Graduate student Justin Miller has been selected the winner of the inaugural Professor Gary Schuster Mentoring Scholarship.
This graduate scholarship was established by Dr. De-Kai Loo and Dr. Jianjian Zhang in 2018 in honor of Schuster, who was a professor of chemistry at Illinois from 1975 to 1994. The scholarship recognizes graduate students who demonstrate outstanding mentorship of undergraduate students.
A fourth-year graduate student, Miller does research in the lab of Mary Schuler, a professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology.
Miller said he is studying how a set of enzymes (cytochrome P450s) at the core of a shared biosynthetic pathway in medicinal plants recognize their substrates and catalyze unusual transformations.
“Because the medicinally useful compounds produced from this pathway are generally in low yield from difficult-to-cultivate plants, my work will enable more economical production of pharmaceuticals such as camptothecin (a cancer chemotherapeutic),” Miller explained.