Faces of Penn State-The Next Generation: Danielle Perry

Home-schooled from age 4 through high school, Perry initially attended a nursing school near her home. After a year and a half, she transferred to Penn State to pursue the physical sciences. In her spare time, Perry enjoys surfing, skydiving, landscaping, and traveling. She also plays the piano and the flute, and she writes poetry. She has 10 siblings, two of whom will study at Oxford University in England in the fall.

Academic background:bachelor's degree in physics with minor in mathematics, Penn State (2004)

Danielle Perry is a recent Penn State graduate from Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. A member of Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College, she has involved herself in research in the two areas that interest her most: physical chemistry and comparative literature. “I have a long-standing love of literature, physics, and psychology,” she said. “Most of my projects involve neuroscience, hearing, speech, and language.”

Perry recently received a joint research fellowship from the National Institutes of Health and Cambridge University, which will fully fund five years of research on the human brain, particularly involving linguistic and speech processing, at Cambridge University in England. She also received a Winston Churchill Scholarship to fund one year of research in the physics of hearing, also at Cambridge.

“I was very excited to find out I had been one of the few chosen for these research opportunities,” she says, “especially because I am the first student from Penn State to receive them.”

In addition, she has received a Fulbright Fellowship that she hopes eventually to use to research brain activity in schizophrenic patients at the Brain Dynamics Centre in Sydney, Australia.
“I hope to build a research career on the connections between these fields, particularly on the brain’s role in language difficulties,” Perry said. She added that she hopes her work in science and medicine will help others experience life in new ways.

Since the spring of 2003, Perry has been doing research at Penn State with Christine Keating, assistant professor of chemistry, on cell dynamics. She uses synthetic cells, which are liquid materials surrounded by a fatty membrane, to study reactivity and other properties of biological cells. Some of this research was done in collaboration with the NIH Biomaterials and Bionanotechnology Summer Institute.

Perry has participated in several presentations and poster sessions around the state, as well as a national conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, to exhibit the findings of her research. She has served as a teaching assistant and a tutor for science and math classes at Penn State. She has been an English language mentor in the International Hospitality Council at Penn State. In addition, she has been involved in the Lutheran Campus Ministry and has done volunteer work in North Carolina and the Dominican Republic. She is a co-founder of Penn State’s student chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics, and she has been the treasurer of Penn State’s Society of Physics Students. She is also a member of the Association for Women in Science and the American Physical Society. She belongs to several honor societies, including Golden Key, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Pi Sigma, and Phi Kappa Phi.

Kristen Neufeld and Barbara K. Kennedy

Kristen Neufeld is a Penn State senior majoring in journalism with a minor in natural science. She wrote this story as part of an independent-study course, during which she received mentoring and gained experience in science writing in the Eberly College of Science Office of Public Information.