Lindsey Brier is a student and promising researcher. She was awarded a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship for her research on cholera toxins—and she owes it all to music.  

"I owe everything I've gotten academically to music, and then musically to the academics side, too," she said.  

Brier, a mathematical-biology major with a minor in chemistry, for fun, plays French horn as a  member of the UH symphonic winds.  She loves to play Strauss.

"I'll be stuck on something, then I go play for a half hour or hour or have a rehearsal and it just clicks all of a sudden," she said. "For some reason I just always find the answer."  

Playing the French horn has helped her find answers in her research of the cholera toxin and its similar, but not as deadly cousin, enterotoxin.  She's creating geometric models to explain the deadly differences. It's research she's also furthered through UH Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships in other institutions.

"The research I've done so far exploits mechanisms behind toxins," she said. "My interest is to find drug targets, and then to develop drugs that can interact with these pathways we found."

The Goldwater Scholarship is awarded to juniors or seniors of academic merit who are pursuing research in the science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) fields.  She recognizes there are few young women pursuing those professions.  She hopes to change that with her own ambitions.

"I would like to pursue a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry, and I'm also interested in the M.D. aspect because without that translation to medical practice, what is research for," Brier said.    

Goldwater Scholars are part of what's happening at the University of Houston.

Fragile X Syndrome. The syndrome causes an increase in a protein in the brain linked to learning and cognition.

"It just became like an obsession for me," said MariVi Tejada-Simon, assistant professor in the college of pharmacy.  She studies how the brain learns and creates memories.  Her examination of a protein called RAC1 in Fragile X looks at balancing  the brain's levels of that protein.

"We're not going to cure autism and mental retardation fully, but we are going to reduce the intellectual disability that those kids have and give them a better quality of life."

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Fraxa Research Foundation, National Fragile X Foundation and UH,  her research considers genetic and pharmacological approaches to achieving that balance.

"Our idea is if it's elevated in the brain and it's the cause of this malformation in the neurons, what will happen if we balance the level of the protein to a normal level," she said. "If you put the levels to a normal baseline, we are hoping that we can revert those deficiencies.

Tejada-Simon uses her research as an opportunity to mentor future scientists.  Her efforts have earned her the inaugural UH Early Faculty Award for Mentoring Undergraduate Research.

"There are a lot of students who are brilliant, not only in academics; they have a brilliant head for research," she said. "If you don't offer them an opportunity, they won't know they can do something like this."

Pharmacy research is part of what's happening at the University of Houston.