18-Year-Old Robert Viña-Marrufo from UTEP Selected for Highly Competitive Pharmaceutical Internship

Two students from The University of Texas at El Paso will spend the summer researching new medicines in the drug discovery laboratories of one of the world’s health care leaders.

Robert Viña-Marrufo and Jeffrey Richards are the first students from UTEP to be selected for The Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) Scientific Internship program in Cambridge, Mass.

“This is an excellent opportunity for both of our students,” said Anny Morrobel-Sosa, Ph.D., dean of the College of Science. “In addition to gaining exceptional laboratory skills, they will also be much better prepared for either admission to graduate programs or for work in pharmaceutical or biotechnology firms.”

From June to August, UTEP juniors Viña-Marrufo and Richards will perform ophthalmology and organic chemistry experiments,respectively, under the guidance of an NIBR research mentor. Each will be assigned a project to work on, with specific milestones and goals they need to reach by the end of the internship. They will present the results of their laboratory research at a poster session, which will be attended by NIBR scientists and scientific leaders, including Mark Fishman, president of NIBR.

“One of the reasons I wanted to get this internship was because I’ve been working with chemistry in an academic environment,” said Richards, a chemistry major at UTEP. “The opportunity with Novartis worked out perfectly because now I can get experience working in an industry setting.”

The NIBR Scientific Internship Program is a paid, 40-hour per week program that combines practical laboratory research with educational components. The program, which began in 2005, recruits interns who have hands-on experience in a lab setting, the ability to communicate and understand the purpose of their research and a passion for science.

Viña-Marrufo fit the criteria. The microbiology major will graduate from Mission Early College High School in the Socorro Independent School District in June. The school enables high school students to earn an associate of arts degree and sufficient college credits to enter a four-year, liberal arts program as a junior. Viña-Marrufo, only 18, received his associate’s degree from El Paso Community College in 2009 and is hoping to graduate from UTEP in two years.

The aspiring academic researcher believes that the NIBR internship will teach him the techniques he needs to set up well-designed experiments—skills that he says are necessary if he intends to have a successful career studying infectious diseases.

“We’re becoming more globalized and we have these diseases that the World Health Organization lists as neglected tropical diseases that are becoming an emergent threat to more than just the tropics,” said Viña-Marrufo, who also teaches chemistry workshops through the College of Science’s Peer Led Team Learning Program. “I think any one of those diseases is fair game for me to study.”

Richards’ background working in the organic chemistry lab at UTEP gave him the hands-on experience he needed to qualify for the chemistry internship. This past winter, he worked with Katja Michael, an associate professor of chemistry, and her graduate students in her lab performing sugar chemistry research.

“A lot of the concepts in chemistry are hard to understand coming from a book,” said Richards, a member of UTEP’s fencing team. “But once you’re able to apply what you learn in a laboratory setting, you become a lot more comfortable in the concepts in chemistry and how they work and why they work.”

Throughout the summer, the interns will attend a variety of events: weekly seminars with NIBR scientists from different disease areas, a peer-run journal club, career panels and social outings.

“We strive to attract talent with diverse expertise, thinking styles and backgrounds in order to create an open and innovative research culture,” said Michele Maher, a program manager in the office of Diversity & Inclusion at NIBR. “In addition, our interaction with UTEP has allowed us to observe UTEP leadership’s commitment—from President Natalicio’s office down—to building scientific leaders in STEM fields.”

NIBR is the global pharmaceuticalresearch organization of Novartis.

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