Grace Maline
- Scott Scholar
- UNO, Information Science & Technology
Additional Information
Bio
Grace is from Oakland, NE and is studying bioinformatics, chemistry, and computer science. Her leadership experience includes two years as the vice president for the Maverick's Club for Bioinformatics. She is beginning her second year as vice president of public relations for the UNO Dance Marathon Fundraiser, a student organization that raises money for our local Children's Hospital and Medical Center. In this role, she is responsible for managing the PR committee and overseeing the organization's social media platforms. Grace has also served for two years on the Chi Omega sorority executive board as the new member educator and currently as president. In this role, she oversees the executive board, chapter operations, and serves as the liaison for the chapter to the University and Chi Omega National Headquarters. Her internship experience includes participating in the UNMC Summer Undergraduate Research Program in the summer of 2018. There, she was responsible for learning concepts, such as metagenomics and the python programming language. She conducted a research project titled "Functional Annotation of Highly Conserved Phosphatase Proteins Between E. Coli and Human". In this research, she compared phosphatase protein sequences between E. Coli and humans and found highly conserved phosphatases. She performed functional annotations to learn what sort of phosphatase functions were highly conserved between very distant species. In the summer of 2019, she worked with Dr. Lisa Cazares at the United States Army Medical Research Institute on Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Frederick, Maryland. There, she helped quantify, via western blotting, the concentration of an ebolavirus protein, VP40, in samples that contained different strains of the virus. She also assisted in projects that analyze tissue samples to examine the body's response to drugs and infectious diseases. Grace wrote a program that would collect and parse Mass Spectrometry data, to search all of the identified metabolites in her database at once. In the summer of 2020, Grace was a headteacher for UNO's Techademy, where she led an Intro to Bioinformatics class for 8th and 9th graders. In the class, they explored exciting topics in bioinformatics, biology, and programming. Other research experience includes working with Dr. Kate Cooper, where she has been developing a project based on exploring SARs-CoV-2 membrane proteins compared to other strains of coronavirus using publicly available data. Grace's career interests include becoming a physician. She is considering specialties in either infectious disease or internal medicine at this time.