One of the most important aspects of the mission of the College of Arts and Sciences is to provide opportunities for our undergraduate students to have significant experiences in the areas of their intellectual interests. This is best done under the guidance of faculty mentors, who in their own research and scholarship are pushing forward the frontiers of discovery and imagination.  Our September student of the month is Alex Winters, a senior chemistry major whose interests and activities in both science and the arts (as a theatre minor) have helped transform him intellectually and emotionally.

His scientific side is reflected in his research in the laboratory of Dr. Caryn Outten in USC’s Chemistry Department where he has been investigating the molecular underpinnings of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This devastating disease results in the degeneration of the human nervous system, loss of muscle function and inevitably, death. Most recently Alex was supported by a summer 2007 scholarship from the Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Program and he continues that research with a Magellan scholarship for the fall. He has approached the study of ALS (more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) from a biochemical perspective, trying to understand the nature of the enzymes involved in the regulation of reactive oxygen species and how mutations affect their function and manifest the disease. His long term goal is to become a physician, so his next step is to apply to medical school, where his interests center on oncology and the help he can give people who suffer from the serious and often lethal diseases of cancer.

Alex is originally from Columbia, SC where his family still resides. He attended Spring Valley High School and then Hammond School on his path to USC. He is a Carolina Scholar and has always been interested in doing science, particularly chemistry, in which he finds that the challenge of the unknown strongly motivates him. But Alex also has interests outside the sciences, particularly in theatre, which is his academic minor. He feels that artistic endeavors are just as challenging and important as the sciences and offer a different but equivalent way to benefit humankind.  His participation in theatre is a natural extension of his interests in human behavior and its representation in performance and he feels strongly that he “has accumulated as much knowledge from theatre as from science”. What more could one ask of a student in the College of Arts and Sciences than to fuse the values and experiences from such diverse disciplines into a course of study at USC?

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