Coe grad receives prestigious fellowships

CEDAR RAPIDS - Emily Roberts, who graduated from Coe College on Sunday, has received two prestigious fellowships to help her through graduate school.

Roberts, 21, a Marion native, was one of 2.000 students out of more than 17,000 applicants to receive the Graduate Research Fellowship Program award from the National Science Foundation, which will provide three years of financial support. Roberts plans to pursue her Ph.D in biostatistics at the University of Michigan, and wants to examine the connection between childhood cancers and socioeconomic status.

'I have always been interested in medical research, because I was actually diagnosed with Type I diabetes when I was four,” Roberts said. 'What's really awesome is that this fellowship with allow me to research what I am interested in.”

Roberts majored in mathematics and psychology at Coe. where she was involved in math club, psychology club, Habitat for Humanity and cheerleading. She also has volunteered for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

After her first year at Coe, she began to study the relationship between roommate selection and student satisfaction, which later became her senior thesis project.

In the summer of 2014, Roberts participated in the Summer Institute in Biostatistics at Columbia University in New York. She worked with a research partner on a project that evaluated the outcomes of a Head Start Program.

Then in the summer of 2015, Roberts was selected to participate in the Harvard Summer Program in Biostatistics and Computational Biology, where she studied data from a clinical trail for children who were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

'The summer programs were amazing,” she said, adding they gave her deeper knowledge of statistics, biostatistics and epidemiology.

In addition to the NSF fellowship, Roberts received a two-year National Institutes for Health fellowship for cancer research.

'I would ideally want to work in a research hospital or research center,” she said. 'An example I usually give is Mayo Clinic to work with a research team and interdisciplinary physicians or people ... to make new discoveries in the medical field.”