The Cupertino Courier
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Student from Cupertino strives to make world a better place
By HUGH BIGGAR
Although Anna Bershteyn comes from Cupertino, she prefers to describe herself as a global citizen.
A native of Ukraine, she moved to the United States with her parents as a child. Bershteyn also has spent time in Argentina and Israel, toured Senegal as a drummer and is developing a doctoral project on a vaccine for HIV.
All of these pursuits helped Bershteyn land a $240,000 Hertz Foundation fellowship to fund her graduate studies in material sciences and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"She was involved in her community, social justice campaigns, leadership roles, and she was also excellent academically," says Rebecca Oles, spokeswoman for the Hertz program. "The scholarship is awarded not only for the project but also for diverse and creative individuals."
One of 15 Hertz recipients out of about 700 applicants, Bershteyn has a range of talents and interests that helped her stand out.
A graduate of Miller Middle School and Castilleja High School, Bershteyn, 22, graduated from MIT in three years. Along the way she trained and volunteered as an emergency medical technician through a school program, advocated for the homeless, learned to play a Senegalese drum known as the sabar, and worked at a metallurgy factory in Argentina before starting her graduate program in the fall of 2005.
Her work as a paramedic helped shape her graduate interests.
"I enjoyed applying my engineering interests to health," Bershteyn says. "It seemed a more real way to treat patients rather than just being in a laboratory, particularly since you have to make complex split-second decisions."
She now hopes to combine engineering and health in her doctoral project on developing an HIV vaccine.
"I'm trying to use materials to make vaccines smarter," Bershteyn says. "Materials can send subtle signals to cells in the body. I'm hoping to build synthetic particles that mimic real pathogens, sending the right signals to immune cells. This could help address the challenges facing design of vaccines against tricky pathogens such as HIV."
Bershteyn, like other recipients of the Hertz award, enjoys the freedom to pursue her research interests without being beholden to a grant.
Ideally, she hopes to apply her interests work in a global setting, a goal shaped by her travels in Senegal.
"Going there helped me keep it real and provided a big pull for me to go work in a part of the world where I'm most needed," Bershteyn says.
"It's in the beginning stages," she says of her vaccine work, "but my goal is to explore mechanisms of the immune response and use that knowledge to improve public health."
