Morgan Schwartz, 2017 Goldwater Scholar
Morgan Schwartz has always been interested in the brain. Throughout junior high and high school, she volunteered as an equestrian coach for young people with autism and ADHD. “I wondered what caused my riders’ brains to function differently from mine,” Schwartz said. That casual wondering led her to a biology major at Smith College with a focus in neurodevelopment—and then to a Goldwater Scholarship in 2017.
For Schwartz, it’s an opportunity to build on the great research opportunities she’s had at Smith—and off campus, too. First in Professor Laura Katz’s microbial diversity lab and now in the zebrafish laboratory of Professor Michael Barresi at Smith, Morgan is studying the connections that form between two halves of the brain and developing software designed to quantify differences in brain structure. “Basically, we’re learning how the brain is wired,” Schwartz says, “how it’s put together and how it’s patterned.”
She conducted similar studies this past summer as a research scholar at Janelia Research Campus, a pioneering neuroscience research center run by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where her work was shaped by a variety of different scientific perspectives that she now uses strategically to tackle problems in biology, says Smith biological sciences professor Michael Barresi.
“Morgan is a biologist, a geneticist, a mathematician, a neuroscientist and a computer scientist,” Barresi says. “But, more importantly, she will become whatever scientist she needs to be to solve the problems that need solving now and in the future. She has independently pushed our science into new areas that are often foreign—even to me,” he adds. “But Morgan uniquely possesses the courage, enthusiasm and determination to solve any problem.”
Schwartz says she almost didn’t apply for the Goldwater because “I was worried about the time commitment.” In the end, though, “it turned out to be a great opportunity!” She says the Goldwater application process has helped her articulate her research and think about what topics she’d like to investigate next. “I’m at the point in my scholarship where I don’t just want to follow the path laid out for me,” she says. “Instead, I’m starting to have my own ideas and my own vision of where I want my work to go.” To that end, Schwartz is thinking about graduate school in England and then a career in academia.
“I’d really like to be a professor in an undergraduate setting,” she says. “I love doing research—being in the lab, exploring things and tackling surprises as they come up. And I’ve received such incredible mentoring at Smith, I’d love to be able to give some of that back.”
Adapted from an article in Grecourt Gate, Smith College Newsleter.