LU Moment: Meet the 2026 David J. Beck Fellows | S9 Ep. 13

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Podcast: S9 Ep. 13
Date: May 11, 2026
Title: LU Moment: Meet the 2026 David J. Beck Fellows | S9 Ep. 13
Host: John Rollins

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JOHN ROLLINS: Welcome to the LU Moment, where we showcase all the great things happening with Lamar University faculty, staff, students and alumni. I'm John Rollins, Associate Director of Community Relations and Public Affairs here at LU and I want to welcome you all to this week's show. The David J Beck Fellowships reward outstanding academic achievement and allow top students to further challenge themselves with unique opportunities for undergraduate research and creative study. Today on the podcast, I've got the three Beck Fellows for this year joining me on the show, Isabella Tran, Sneha Jobby and Homer Tijerina. Welcome to all three of you. Glad to have you all. Whoever wants to start, can start. And I just want a brief explanation of the David J Beck Fellowships and how it all works.

SNEHA JOBBY: Sure, I can go for it. The Lamar University David J Beck Fellowship is an opportunity that was created by Mr. David Beck, who is an alum of the institution and currently a practicing lawyer. Mr. Beck created this opportunity at Lamar University to allow students to further their education and the Beck Fellowship is Lamar University's highest and most prestigious student award, covering a full year of tuition, room and board and also providing up to $10,000 for a summer research program or similar scholarly activity.

JOHN: You nailed that. You’ve got your elevator pitch down. I think you worded it perfectly, and it's, it is a very prestigious honor. And this year, we're lucky enough to have three amazing students take part in this. I know it's normally two, right? So this is really cool. So I'm going to go ahead and let y'all Introduce yourselves first, and then we'll go a little deeper into what your research activity is going to be this summer, because I'm excited to hear more, and I want our listeners and readers to be able to hear more as well. So yeah, let's go ahead and hear from you three. Who wants to start?

HOMER TIJERINA: I can start. So as you said, my name is Homer Tijerina, and I am a senior here at Lamar, and I study biochemistry. I have a minor in chemistry, and I am on the pre-physician route track. There's really not a concentration at Lamar, but that's what I eventually hope to become. So I'm getting all my prereqs and all that fun stuff done before I apply for my next cycle in April.

ISABELLA TRAN: I can start next, so my name is Isabella Tran I am currently a junior here at Lamar, and I am studying biology with a minor in Chemistry on the pre-med track.

SNEHA: I am pretty similar to Isabella here. My name is Sneha, and I'm pursuing a major in biology, and I'm also pursuing a minor in chemistry, and I am on the pre-optometry track.

JOHN: We’ve got some high achieving students here, for sure. Y'all are doing some difficult work here on campus. Are all of you from the area, or any of you from the area? Where are y'all from?

HOMER: I was, I'm from here. I live in Port Acres or Port Arthur, but I wasn't born there. I was born in McAllen, Texas, reppin’ the 956, but I was raised in Freeport, Texas. I forgot that area code, but that's where I was from for the longest time. And then we moved here in 2021, and then I started attending Lamar in ‘20, actually, ‘24 so I'm a transfer student. I was at LCPA getting my Associates, and I transferred over into Lamar, kind of my junior year. So that's a little bit about me. Isabella?

ISABELLA: I've been pretty much here my whole life; I live in Nederland currently. I was born in Port Arthur, but I went to Nederland High School, but transferred to, I'm not sure if you guys know what Texas Academy is here at Lamar University?

JOHN: Well, we're glad you stuck around. Yeah, definitely.

HOMER: Y'all forgive her for being a bulldog, though.

SNEHA: So, I am not from Beaumont at all. I'm actually from Missouri City near Houston. So, I attended Hightower High School in Fort Bend County through their pathways and technology program. And that was kind of my first foray into the realm of STEM and I moved to Beaumont once I started becoming a student at Lamar University. And I'm very glad I did, because I've met some pretty great people.

HOMER: Yeah, the community is a great community. It's, I think one of the key aspects of Lamar is that it's not U of H, where you have one class and its 500 students and one professor, which is not even teaching. You actually get to know the people here. You get to even know the professors. That's definitely been a big aspect for me, actually making these real connections with my professors. And you can actually, honestly call them mentors. So I don't know how the bigger universities do it. How you actually even form connections at your university? Connections in your universities?

JOHN: Yeah, that's a great point. And you know, anytime I have students on, I'm always impressed that y'all realize the impact of that and how important it is, because it's not the case at all universities. So I'm glad that y'all see that for sure. So you mentioned Sneha earlier, about the $10,000 sort of, I guess we'll call it a scholarship towards research. So that brings us into the fun part, right? Let's talk about y'all’s summer projects, what you’ve got going on. Whoever wants to start. You want to start, Isabella?

ISABELLA: So this summer, I leave on May 20, but my research will be in Taipei, Taiwan. I'll be learning more about kind of nanotechnology and immunology, putting them together to really aid the immune system to combat cancer. So I'll be working with different approaches, such as cancer vaccines, mRNA programming, and T cell therapies to really better the treatments for cancer patients, which will hopefully reduce a lot of the side effects that really do come with current cancer cell therapies. And just super excited, super, super excited for the experience, especially with the research I do now, it really does combine what I've really been interested in with chemistry research and cancer cell research I got to do back at MD Anderson last summer.

JOHN: Oh, wow. Okay, that’s so incredible to me that students of your age, or what I'm assuming is your age, are just putting themselves out there like this. This is cutting-edge kind of research, because cancer is something that, unfortunately, is not going away. So why not try to find ways to get ahead of it or help further the research around it? And that's what our students are doing… in Taiwan, of all places. Super Amazing. So tell me a little more about MD Anderson. What did you do last summer? What were you helping them with?

ISABELLA: So last summer, I was under the King's Foundation program. It's like a kind of an umbrella summer program, which I highly recommend if you are interested in applying the catalyst programs. But I got to work with Dr Ping in the experimental therapeutics department, and I worked with these two DNA kind of inhibitor drugs called H, R, o7, 61 and olaparib, I'm kind of testing its immunomodulatory effects to see how we could also similar to what I'm going to do this summer, but aid the immune system in combating these cancer cells. So that's like the basis premises of what I did over the summer last summer.

JOHN: Fantastic. Such important work for sure. Sneha, you want to jump in?

SNEHA: Sure. So, my project this summer is taking place in Boston, Massachusetts, at the New England College of Optometry, which I'll henceforth refer to as NECO and the Harvard imaging core facility. I'm very excited to be working under the supervision of Dr Ananya Dada, who is a professor there at the New England College of Optometry and also runs the ocular surface disease lab there. So as a pre optometry student, I've really been interested in pursuing opportunities that relate to ocular health and ocular biology, but unfortunately, there aren't a lot of opportunities to do that kind of research here, just due to the infrastructure and equipment needed to pursue that kind of research. So the David J. Beck Fellowship does provide that opportunity to pursue these experiences that may not be possible without that kind of support. In Boston this summer, my specific project will be looking at the role of chronic metabolic stress and how that impacts ocular health. So specifically, when patients have diabetes, which is a condition characterized by chronic hypoglycemia or high blood sugar, what that does is it can damage the nerves throughout the body. So if you've ever heard of diabetic neuropathy, you can feel a lot of tingling pain and sometimes loss of sensation throughout the body. So in diabetic neuropathy, specifically in the eye, what can occur is that this chronically elevated high blood sugar can impact the nerves within the eye and impact that ocular health, the immune system within the eye, and that ability to see properly. So my research will be inducing diabetes in mice and then performing experiments on them to see kind of the progression of the condition throughout the 10 weeks that I'll be there in Boston and seeing, what can we do, ultimately, to prevent this chronic high blood sugar from impacting the eye as much as it does.

JOHN: Now that's pretty incredible. And you’ve got to think too, you know, I know you're going elsewhere to conduct the research, but Southeast Texas has a high population of diabetes patients.

SNEHA: Absolutely. So diabetes is actually currently the fastest growing chronic illness in the world, and I believe in Southeast Texas, specifically Nacogdoches County, the rates of diabetes prevalence in that area outmatch and outpace that of the rest of the country. So it specifically is a problem within Texas, and that makes me all the more excited to be able to do research on that this summer, because I know in my hometown and in my community, it is something that affects so many people.

JOHN: Yeah, you can take it back home, take it back here to Southeast Texas, or Texas as our state as a whole, and implement some of what you find, for sure. Well, congratulations early, and best of luck to you as well. And then Homer, we’ll toss it over to you.

HOMER: Alright. Well, we're going to take it back to cancer. I'll be studying at Roswell Park Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York. It's actually the first institution solely focused on cancer research in the world, I want to say in 1898 around that time, it's been there for a long time, and it's been a key focal point for cancer research. I'll be working under Dr. Shashaudri. He has a big team out there, and they're studying research specifically on already FDA approved medications, such as preventable which is a beta blocker. So what I will be focusing on, can we make radiation therapy, which is a key cornerstone in cancer treatment, more efficient? So a lot of research is, can we find a new cure? Can we create a new drug? Can we create something new for a cure? My work will be, we already have certain tools. Can we use these tools to make what we have more efficient? So current radiation therapy specifically in oral cancer models, he works on head, neck and throat cancer specifically. So when you have tumors around there, they're usually very small and small, very tight spaces. Chemotherapy is usually not very prominent, because chemotherapy has a lot more side effects. You lose your hair, your body starts to fatigue. So we don't really want to run chemotherapy on the oral cancer models, or when you have oral cancer. So radiation therapy is definitely the main type of treatment. However, radiation therapy, it kills cells, normal cells usually can focus and just try to attack the tumor. However, there is side effects. There's also the tumor might be repressing it, and also can damage surrounding tissue. So my work will be up there learning on how beta blockers, such as Propanolol, can remove the survival pathways that normal cells use, but also tumor cells use them as well to kind of buy, like go through the back door of what the treatment is trying to do. So kind of just cut that specifically. Also here at Lamar, I work on synthesis, and I love alpha and beta blockers. That's actually what my current research is on synthesizing them. However, I would like to use already on the market medications that are alpha and beta blockers, other than Propanolol, to see if it could also enhance radiation therapy. So that's a little summary of what I’ll be doing this summer.

JOHN: So you're looking to basically enhance the infrastructure that's already there?

HOMER: Yes, which is just more efficient, also cheaper as well, because it makes it cost money, and that's usually main issue. I think we have the intelligence and the toolset to probably find some cure for so many diseases, but the main issue is money. So instead, we just have to make it better.

JOHN: I think we could learn that lesson a lot of ways. Yeah, apply that type of thinking into a lot of things, for sure. So for if anyone's listening, they might be interested in the Beck Fellow Program. How would you go about, how did you all apply? Do you just hear it from your professors? Or do they need to go to a certain website? Or how does this work? Who wants to go first?

HOMER: So for me, as I mentioned before, I've already been doing research at Lamar. It was underpaid. It was not underpaid. It was not paid at all. It was just simply me wanting to expand on my idea. My research is called Vitalis. It's on an advanced part of epinephrine. But so I went to Dr. Bahrim, the head of the research, of undergrad research. And we were talking, and as I was able to kind of explain myself, he's like, I want you to apply for the SURF and Beck Fellowship, I think, or the surf and the Beck fellowship. I had no idea what that was. I looked into it and realized that what it was, which is, you know, a $10,000 research stipend during the summer, and also an entire year paid of tuition. However, I didn't know. I found that out towards the end of Thanksgiving break, and winter break was about to happen. The deadline was in January 15. I had 30 days to start applying for it, but I got it done, you know.

SNEHA: My process of being able to apply for the David J. Beck Fellowship was a little bit different, but Dr. Bahrim, who is the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research here at Lamar, was also a very key person that directed me on that path. I was able to meet with Dr. Bahrim because someone that I had met in my freshman Cardinal Communities class at Lamar was his research mentee, Jason Withers, so he was able to connect us. And when I had met with Dr. Bahrim, I was completely unconfident about my ability to do research. I was like, I don't even know how I'm going to bring anything to a lab, but he really encouraged me to go for it and pursue these opportunities. So I'm very grateful for him for connecting me with my current project mentor, Dr. Cooknor from the Department of Biology, as well as encouraging me to pursue those opportunities.

ISABELLA: For me, it was bit different. I started in the summer, since after my internship at MD Anderson, I was like, I want to continue this type of research. I want to go more in depth. So I met with Dr. Ian Lian, who really specializes more in that research here at Lamar, and got in contact with him ever since then, we just kind of worked towards connecting with different labs in different countries to see what my options were, and truly grateful to have this opportunity to go to Taiwan since this will be my first time going abroad. So shout out to him.

JOHN: Well, what a first experience you're going to have, right? You'll never forget that. So thanks again to all three of you for joining me on the LU Moment. I wish you the best this summer with your research projects, and I can't wait to hear when you get back about what you found out. To catch the LU stories, just like Sneha’s Isabella's and Homer’s, be sure to search LU Moment wherever you get your podcasts to keep up with the events, activities, programs and people right here at Lamar University. This is John Rollins, your host. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.