Anisa Cole, a 21-year-old biology major from Richmond, Texas, is one of Prairie View A&M University’s first two Barry Goldwater Scholars. She nearly didn’t apply — no PVAMU student had ever won, she was coming from an R2 university, and the acceptance rate was reportedly 8% — but decided that “if I did end up winning, it wouldn’t have been the first time I surprised myself.” Her confidence grew through Stanford’s CREST program and the Harvard/MIT HEART program, where she used gene-editing tools to study how Epstein-Barr virus causes disease. As a PVAMU RISE scholar she conducted paid research under Dr. Naznin Sultana and contributed to a book chapter on tissue engineering. As a 2025 Harvard-Amgen Scholar she is now studying Merkel cell polyomavirus and Merkel cell carcinoma.