Glastonbury Native, UConn Student Gets Major Engineering Scholarship

STORRS, CT — University of Connecticut junior and Glastonbury native Romir Raj, an honors student majoring in biomedical engineering, has been named a Goldwater Scholar, school officials said.

The Goldwater Scholarship is considered the nation’s premier scholarship for undergraduates studying math, natural sciences, and engineering.

The Goldwater Scholarship was established by Congress to honor the late U.S. Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, with the purpose of identifying students of outstanding ability and promise, and encouraging them to pursue advanced study and research careers.

Scholars receive one- or two-year awards that cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.

Raj is among just 413 students selected nationally for the award this year.

Raj has an extensive amount of research experience as an undergraduate at UConn. He first joined the lab of Assistant Professor of Cell Biology Mayu Inaba at UConn Health, which studies chromosomal homolog pairings. He also joined the lab of Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology in the Institute for Systems Genomics Jelena Erceg at UConn Storrs to investigate homolog pairing in developing Drosophila embryos.

In the summer of 2022, Raj received a SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fund) Award from the Office of Undergraduate Research and conducted research in both labs, where he further studied and built upon his past research on interchromosomal interactions – mainly homolog pairing.

His research experience resulted in twojournal publications: Nature Communications and Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.

See more about the award on the UConn Today site.