Chemistry and Biochemistry graduate student Amber Rolland has been awarded the 2021-22 UO Doctoral Research Fellowship.

Open to students in any UO PhD program, the fellowship is awarded to the most outstanding doctoral student as determined by a faculty selection committee. Dissertations are judged on the quality of the written proposal and the potential impact of the research both within and beyond the student’s field. The fellowship carries an award stipend of up to $20,000 and includes a University tuition waiver, GE fee subsidies, and GE health insurance.

Amber is a fifth-year graduate student in the Prell Lab. Her dissertation work has pushed the boundaries of native ion mobility-mass spectrometry to elucidate more complex, detailed information about biomolecular structure, overcoming the quantitative barrier of this technique. The first half of Amber’s dissertation work comprises her computational and molecular dynamics approaches to gain insight into gas-phase compaction/structure of protein ions and to enable, for the first time, quantitative comparison between experimental and simulated structural data with known accuracy and precision. The second, ongoing half of her PhD research applies these computational approaches to investigate features of protein complexes which are important for human health yet typically difficult to characterize with other state-of-the-art methods due to their heterogeneity and/or disorder, including pore-forming toxins of interest for drug delivery such as alpha-hemolysin and cytolysin A, human eye lens crystallin proteins involved in cataract formation, and dynein motor protein subcomplexes.

In her free time, Amber enjoys hiking, traveling, and photography. She is the recipient of an ARCS Foundation of Oregon fellowship, John R. Moore Scholarship, Graduate Doctoral Service Award, and Peter O’Day Fellowship.