Raeven Bastock
Raeven Bastock was awarded this year’s Graduate College Fellowship, one of just five named fellowships awarded to Ohio University graduate students on a competitive nomination basis.
The award provides a fellowship of $15,000, plus a full-tuition scholarship for fall and spring semesters, for her project on “Temperature dependent gene regulation in Staphylococcus aureus.”
Bastock is a second year Ph.D. student in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biological Sciences.
She works closely with Dr. Ronan Carroll, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, and Dr. Erin Murphy, Associate Professor in the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, investigating temperature dependent regulation in Staphylococcus aureus (Staph).
Her research project came from the idea that, remarkably, 30 percent of the human population lives with Staph colonized in their nose, without any apparent ill effect. Bastock wanted to dig deeper and understand why Staph lives in the nose and how it affects a person once it enters the body.
This fellowship will help her research project immensely because this data is novel and has not been investigated before. During this time when she is not working in the lab, Bastock is still very busy analyzing all of the data she has collected and confirming her data to make sure what she sees is actually true. She also will be looking in closer detail at critical proteins that are incorporated within the cell walls of Staph and their function.
As far as her career aspirations, Bastock loves teaching and recently was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Associate Teaching Award, where undergraduates nominate graduate TAs who have shown exceptional teaching skills. She also is interested in continuing the experiments she is working on now and discovering how the cells in the body respond to each other.
Bastock has been attending Ohio University since 2013. She completed her undergraduate degree and she did not want to part with the campus just yet.
“Ohio University feels like home to me, and it is where I feel the most comfortable. All of the campus scenery is so beautiful, and the Bobcat community is so strong,” she said.
Bastock is a very hard worker and is passionate about what she does.
—by Kaitlyn Lyons
Raeven Bastock in the lab.
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