Undergraduates contribute to scientific discovery at the University of Iowa

Nicholas McCarty wasn’t even sure he wanted to go to college, but his parents insisted that he submit a few applications.

Now, the UI senior from Geneva, Illinois, is preparing for graduation and has plans to continue his education with a master’s degree and, eventually, a PhD in biophysics. He learned in March that he was selected for a Fulbright award, which will take him to the United Kingdom.

McCarty credits this scholarly transformation to his experience working on research. Urged by his older brother, a biomedical engineer, to seek campus employment in a lab, McCarty emailed five professors during his first week in Iowa City. With the exception of one who was retiring, they all invited him in to talk about opportunities.

E. Dale Abel, chair of internal medicine in the Carver College of Medicine and director of the Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center, stood out to the young student.

“When I first met with him,” McCarty recalls, “I was petrified. Even though I had prepared by reading several of his papers, I didn’t really know what he was talking about when he referred to insulin signaling and downstream targets. But he was confident, and I was drawn to the way he talked about his research. Plus, the focus of his lab is on cardiac dysfunction in diabetic patients. The heart is an astounding organ, pumping blood day in and day out for your entire life. It is fascinating that the dietary and environmental decisions we make in life impact how well the heart works, and as soon as it stops or a section of it fails, there are serious problems.”

In the Abel Lab, McCarty is probing the role of proteins in the heart, specifically those that work as glucose transporters (they take sugar from the bloodstream into the cells), and trying to pinpoint why that function is partially inhibited in a high-fat diet. He spends up to 30 hours a week in the lab reading research papers and conducting experiments, and hopes to publish his first paper as lead author soon.