Hopkins BME undergrad Kyra Bowden awarded Goldwater Scholarship

Johns Hopkins junior Kyra Bowden has been awarded the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship, recognizing her work in biomedical engineering.

The scholarship, named in honor of late Senator and Major General Barry Goldwater, supports college sophomores and juniors pursuing research careers in engineering, mathematics, and the natural sciences.

This year, the Goldwater Scholarship Foundation is supporting 438 new scholars selected from an applicant pool of about 5,000. Each scholar will receive up to $7,500 per academic year until either two years have passed or the student graduates. Schools can nominate up to four applicants each year.

Bowden aspires to use machine learning and image analysis to study disease and injury and optimize outcomes for orthopedics patients. Working with Seth Blackshaw and Jonathan Ling since spring 2022, Bowden has analyzed differential exon inclusion in proteins using ASCOT, a database of alternative splicing events drawn from hundreds of thousands of mouse and human RNA sequencing datasets, and developed Python scripts to use the AlphaFold v2.0 AI platform to model how ASCOT-identified splicing events impact protein structure and function. Bowden has received author credits in the top journals Nature Communications and Nature Medicine and is the first author of a poster presented at the Society for Neuroscience. She also received a grant from the Leong Summer Research Fund and will be spending this summer in Switzerland as part of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Excellence Research Internship Program. Outside of the lab, Bowden has served as a resident advisor since her sophomore year and is an officer of the Johns Hopkins chapters of the Biomedical Engineering Society and SHARE (Supporting Hospitals Abroad with Resources and Equipment). She volunteers with Thread, JHU Tutorial Project, and at a local health care center.

To learn more about applying for the Goldwater Scholarship and other scholarships, visit the university’s National Fellowship Program website.