Student Profiles

Jillian Riveros attended Wheaton College through the Posse Foundation Scholarship. During her time there, Jillian studied synthetic organic chemistry in Professor Chris Kalberg’s Lab where she worked to incorporate green chemistry approaches to the synthesis of substituted phenylalanine amino acids. Through this research, she was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship. Outside of the lab, Jillian worked towards inclusive STEM programs at Wheaton College which included co-founding a living space on campus for underrepresented students earning STEM degrees called the Ohm Initiative.

In addition to Wheaton College, Jillian spent two summers at Vanderbilt University during her undergraduate degree. There she researched biomedical informatics in Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal’s Lab where she studied how artificial intelligence voice models can improve digital health platforms. She also researched cardiovascular metabolism in Dr. David Wasserman’s Lab where she investigated how exercise training influenced vasodilation.

After graduating summa cum laude from Wheaton College with a B.A. in Biochemistry, Jillian became a research assistant in Dr. Gökhan Hotamışlıgil’s Lab at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. During her two years in the Hotamışlıgil Lab, she participated in 5 different projects centered around obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, lipolysis, and mitochondrial metabolism.

These experiences expanded Jillian’s interest in mitochondrial and cardiovascular metabolism. Her goal through the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program is to better characterize how reactive oxygen species and calcium contribute to cardiac ischemia-reperfusion injury. Through the collaboration between Dr. Elizabeth Murphy and Dr. Mike Murphy, she will apply both optical and mass spectrometry-based approaches to key genetic models available at the NIH and Cambridge to study ischemia-reperfusion injury in hopes of potentially advancing the development of therapeutics.