After spending a year at UNC-Chapel Hill, Katy Klein found herself seeking something different in both community and academic offerings. She looked down the road to NC State, where she first earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry with a minor in Japanese. Now, she is wrapping up her master’s in biochemistry.

Finding a community in the pack

Once she got to NC State, Katy lived in the Transfer Connections Village (TCV). She quickly fell in love with the space and worked as a village mentor during her junior and senior years. Enrolled in an accelerated bachelor’s/master’s degree program, Katy knew she wanted to be involved with University Housing while completing her master’s, and applied to be a graduate student assistant. 

As a biochemistry major, Katy spent a lot of time in the lab at NC State. During her undergraduate years, she conducted research in Guozhou Xu, Ph.D.’s laboratory, where she studied the IKK/NF-κB pathway to treat autoimmune disorders. In her master’s thesis research, she worked alongside Robert Rose, Ph.D., on thermophilic enzyme 2-oxoglutarate carboxylase. The goal of this research was to engineer the enzyme to function at room temperature, enabling its use to accelerate carbon fixation in biofuel plants. 

Katy also worked as a teaching assistant for the introductory biochemistry laboratory (BCH 452) twice. She has helped design protocols for labs, prepped materials and graded reports. “Being a teaching assistant is a very rewarding experience, though! I love helping other students learn about biochemistry,” she said. 

Biochemistry went beyond just her course of study. Katy was also involved with the Biochemistry Club at NC State. She served as a club officer for two years, supporting outreach events and mentoring other biochemistry students.

Her minor in Japanese language also provided Katy with a strong community. Taking seven semesters of Japanese courses taught her a lot about the culture. She resonated with the community of classmates who shared similar interests. 

An accidental entrepreneur

When Katy first applied to be a University Housing graduate assistant, she was hoping to work for a science-based village. She was quite surprised to be placed in the Albright Entrepreneurs Village (AEV) despite having no prior entrepreneurial experience. But she was open to the challenge to broaden her perspectives. 

As a graduate assistant to the village, she helps supervise village mentors and plan entrepreneurship-related events and trips for village residents. Alongside the mentors, Katy helped host several impactful events, including Beyond the Handshake (where students learned how to follow up with employers after an interview), DURM day (where students took a field trip to Durham entrepreneurs) and Build Your Own Brand (where students learned how to brand themselves as an entrepreneur). “These events were impactful not only to our residents, but to me as well, as I learned these things for the first time myself,” said Katy. 

She took this time to explore more of NC State Innovation and Entrepreneurship, including Startup Horror Stories and the Entrepreneurship Showcase — which was Katy’s favorite to see what students were creating and art from Student Made. 

Stepping outside of her comfort zone also gave her the chance to learn from her supervisors and mentors about entrepreneurship and how it can be applied beyond just starting a business. Katy reflected on a time when she discussed her lack of experience in entrepreneurship and in mentoring students in an entrepreneurship living-learning village. Ahmed Ali, the director of student programs and her supervisor, changed her perspective, highlighting that her biochemical research is innovative and could become entrepreneurial. 

Innovation in science

For Katy’s master’s in biochemistry, she opted for the thesis track, which involved the development and implementation of an independent research project. She joined Robert Rose, Ph.D.’s lab, where they studied two enzymes used in carbon fixation. 

With a focus on the 2-oxoglutarate carboxylase (OGC) enzyme’s biotin carboxylase (BC) domain, Katy began developing a streamlined method to measure OGC BC activity. She started out by asking questions and receiving guidance from Rose on how to navigate this measurement. As Katy gained confidence, she got creative and came up with new innovative methods that will continue to be used in the lab after she graduates. 

As her skills improved, Katy took more initiative with her thesis project. At first, Rose wanted her to elucidate the rate-limiting step of the enzyme. As she made progress in the research, the project took a different direction than anyone had anticipated. 

2-oxoglutarate carboxylase is a biotin-dependent carboxylase, which fixates carbon onto the molecule biotin. Most research on these types of enzymes is done using free biotin, but in nature, biotin-dependent carboxylases attach biotin to another part of the enzyme called the biotin carboxyl carrier protein (BCCP). OGC activity had never been studied with BCCP before, and Katy pioneered this research, taking an innovative approach and discovering that OGC BC appears to act in a completely different way with BCCP than with biotin, a phenomenon scientists had never observed before. Although Katy is graduating, Rose plans to continue researching OGC BC kinetics with BCCP in order to confirm that this phenomenon still occurs under different conditions.

Future Commodore

After NC State, Katy is headed to Vanderbilt University for a Ph.D. graduate student fellowship in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program (IGP) for biomedical and biological sciences. This program will help her continue developing skills as a biochemist and pursue a dissertation on autoimmune disorders and protein misfolding diseases.

Throughout this program, Katy will use her entrepreneurial mindset to succeed. “Research is innovation at its core, and when pursuing the creation of new scientific knowledge, you have to be highly adaptable and not afraid to take risks,” she said. Katy also noted that she will pull heavily on her creativity, communication and organizational skills as well.

Advice to her younger self

While reflecting on her journey through her undergraduate and graduate studies at NC State, Katy shared advice she would give her younger self. “Always take the opportunities that you are given, and don’t be afraid to branch out.”

Although being heavily involved on campus kept her quite busy, she found it incredibly fulfilling. Katy noted that college is the time to figure out who you are and who you want to be. She credits her involvement with housing, academics and clubs as what taught her a lot about herself. 

This post was originally published in Entrepreneurship News.