Skip to main content
Division of Graduate Education and Postdoctoral Affairs Graduate Division
  1. HOME
  2. Student Life
  3. Student Spotlights
  4. archived-students
  5. Angela Nicholson-Shaw

  Meet Angela Nicholson-Shaw 

Tell us a bit about yourself: I grew up in Nipomo, California and fell in love with science for the first time during college when I cloned a fluorescent protein into bacteria during a lab class and made them glow. Since then, I have had a keen interest in the tools that scientists have at their disposal to address many important research questions. I went to Biola University for my bachelor’s degree and majored in biochemistry. My first research experiences were studying gene expression in Dr. Yingxi Lin’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Elliot Meyerowitz’s lab at the California Institute of Technology. 

What are you studying/researching? I joined the Biology Ph.D. program at UC San Diego in 2015 and I'm currently studying RNA regulation in Amy Pasquinelli’s lab. I love this field because I am looking at some of the most fundamental processes that are at play in all cells. [Check out her award-winning Grad SLAM research talk here.]

Tell us about your involvement on campus and in the community: I've worked with various programs to encourage high school students and younger female students to pursue their interests in science. I have served as a judge for the San Diego science fair and on the scholarship committee with the Association for Women in Science. For the past two years, I have also been on the admissions committee for the Biology Doctoral Program.

Have you been awarded any fellowships or grants? I was awarded a position with the Cellular, Molecular and Genetics Training Grant in 2016. In 2017, I was selected for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF-GRFP) and will continue with that program until 2020.

Why UC San Diego? UC San Diego was particularly appealing to me because there is such a broad scope of research going on. Although I knew I was generally interested in gene expression, I hadn’t identified the specific area I wanted to work in at the time I came here. Knowing that there were so many great scientists addressing many important questions in this field meant that I would have many opportunities for my doctoral work as well as collaboration opportunities. Additionally, I was drawn to UC San Diego because it is situated in the heart of the biotech industry and many companies have been spun off from research done at the university.