Alexandra Zetye is recognized by the Goldwater Scholarship Program

OU undergraduate Alexandra Zetye has received honorable mention in the 2014 Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program competition. This scholarship is the most prestigious award for undergraduate science/engineering/math majors in the United States. About 1000 sophomores and juniors are nominated nationwide (each university can nominate only four), for which approximately 300 are awarded a scholarship and about 150 receive honorable mention. Zetye also received an honorable mention last year, the first year any OU student has been recognized by the Goldwater Foundation.

In 2014, Oakland University selected three undergraduates to be our Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship nominees. They were:

• Lisa Shammas. Lisa is a Biology major from Troy, Michigan. She was awarded a travel grant from the Endocrine Society to present her cancer research at the society’s 95th Annual Meeting and Expo in San Francisco last summer.
•  Hanna Trzeciakiewicz. Hanna is from Washington, Michigan and is majoring in Biochemistry. She holds the Michael P. and Elizabeth A. Kenny Merit Scholarship for the Sciences, and conducts research on Alzheimer’s disease.
•  Alexandra Zetye. Alexandra is from Rochester Hills, Michigan and is majoring in Engineering Biology, Mathematics, Piano Performance, and French. She is a coauthor on a paper describing a mathematical model of Chagas disease.

Current undergraduates interested in applying for the award next year should see the OU-Goldwater website. The application webpage won't be available for the 2015 competition until later this fall, but expect an application procedure and timeline very similar to that used in 2014.

Zetye has been involved with undergraduate research at OU, including the Summer Undergraduate Program in Eye Research (SUPER) of the Eye Research Institute working with CBR member Andrew Goldberg. She has also performed research with CBR member Mohammad-Reza Siadat in the School of Engineering and Computer Science, and most recently with CBR member Gerard Madlambayan in the Department of Biological Sciences. Her research with Anna Spagnuolo and Meir Shillor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics led to the publication:

A Model for Chagas Disease with Oral and Congenital Transmission, 2013, Daniel J. Coffield Jr., Anna Maria Spagnuolo, Meir Shillor, Ensela Mema, Bruce Pell, Amanda Pruzinsky, Alexandra Zetye. PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0067267.

This work presents a new mathematical model for the domestic transmission of Chagas disease, a parasitic disease affecting humans and other mammals throughout Central and South America. The model takes into account congenital transmission in both humans and domestic mammals as well as oral transmission in domestic mammals. The model has time-dependent coefficients to account for seasonality and consists of four nonlinear differential equations, one of which has a delay, for the populations of vectors, infected vectors, infected humans, and infected mammals in the domestic setting. Computer simulations show that congenital transmission has a modest effect on infection while oral transmission in domestic mammals substantially contributes to the spread of the disease. In particular, oral transmission provides an alternative to vector biting as an infection route for the domestic mammals, who are key to the infection cycle. This may lead to high infection rates in domestic mammals even when the vectors have a low preference for biting them, and ultimately results in high infection levels in humans.

The Goldwater website lists Zetye's career goals as a "Dual M.D./Ph.D in Bioengineering. Conduct research in medical nanotechnology and teach at the university level."

The Department of Music, Theatre and Dance will present Zetye the Jennifer Scott Memorial Award at the 15th Annual MaTilDa Awards in April.