Shanice Webster ’15 Is Recognized as an Exceptional Early Career Scientist
Shanice Webster ’15, biological chemistry, has been named a 2022 Hanna H. Gray Fellow and recognized as one of 25 exceptional early career scientists by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Webster is a post-doctoral researcher at Duke University, where she studies how the interactions between plants, pathogens, and surrounding bacteria underlie plant diseases. In the face of climate change and the threat it poses to food crops, Webster hopes that her research will lead to insights and disease interventions that would improve global sustainability.
As an undergraduate at Grinnell, Webster was an advisee of Professor Shannon Hinsa-Leasure and conducted Mentored Advanced Projects (MAPs) with both Hinsa-Leasure and Elaine Marzluff, Breid-McFarland Professor of Science. Her research experiences led her to graduate school at the Dartmouth College Geisel School of Medicine. After several research rotations, she joined the laboratory of George O’Toole, Ph.D., the very same advisor under whom Hinsa-Leasure had obtained her doctorate over a decade earlier. The unlikelihood of this multi-generational training legacy isn’t lost on O’Toole, Hinsa-Leasure, or Webster: the three often joke that she is a “scientific granddaughter.”
In 2019, Webster returned to Grinnell for a semester as a lecturer, co-teaching a section of BIO-150 Introduction to Biological Inquiry. In recent years, she has joined Hinsa-Leasure’s classes virtually, sharing her research interests and trajectory with current Grinnell students.
The Hanna H. Gray Fellowship will not only fund Webster’s post-doctoral training but will allow her to establish her own research laboratory and support her through her early years as independent faculty. In total, fellows may receive up to $1.4 million each in funding that is not restricted to specific research projects. Rather, the program webpage states, “In keeping with HHMI’s ethos of supporting “people, not projects,” fellows will have the freedom to follow their curiosity and study the scientific questions that matter most — changing direction as needed — for the duration of the award.”
The Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program is named for Hanna Holborn Gray, the former chair of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Board of Trustees and former president of the University of Chicago. Initiatives developed under Gray’s leadership fostered diversity and inclusion in science education on campuses across the U.S., and the Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program carries on this legacy today.
Congratulations to Shanice Webster ’15!