For Tess, personally contributing to the furthering of human knowledge is the ultimate reward for her work. She recently received a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship.
“I want to make the world a better place, and that desire is what inspires me and gets me through some of the more mundane aspects of research,” she says. “The prospect of discovering something new will always excite me.”
In her first semester at UNC Charlotte, she began working with Shan Yan in his lab, which studies DNA damage response and repair, a multipath processes that responds to endogenous or exogenous damage to DNA.
“Tess is interested in studying in the area of genome stability and tumorigenesis, and is passionate, dedicated, and committed in her cutting-edge research project,” Yan says.