Leading in the Lab

Trinity University’s Semmes Distinguished Scholars in Science Scholarship gives Bethany Bass ’26 the chance to do something special in the research lab.

At Trinity, she gets to disagree.

A senior biochemistry major from Boulder, Colorado, Bass conducts research on wild yeast that has real-world commercial and environmental applications. She receives full tuition, plus $5,000 for research as part of the Semmes award. Bass plans to apply to medical school after a gap year, and says that Trinity has offered her incredible opportunities to connect with supportive faculty and a tight-knit community of fellow scholars– all in a small-school, liberal arts environment that also fuels STEM students with state-of-the-art tech, facilities, and resources.

Most importantly, she gets to shape her own experiments. And because Bass has enough hands-on experience to know when the lab needs to take a new direction, she feels that her voice is valued.

“One of the scariest things that I've learned at Trinity is how to disagree with my research professor,” says Bass, who researches with biology professor Brian Teague, Ph.D. “I think Dr. Teague would totally laugh to hear me say that because they know, initially, I wasn't exactly like that, but I think it's really valuable to have a stake in your research.”

The Right Resources

The Semmes Scholarship makes Trinity a top destination for students like Bass, who are seeking a chance to pair big-time STEM resources with the flexibility and versatility of a small-school, liberal arts environment.

This is a full-tuition scholarship that includes a $5,000 research grant, with the primary condition that students must major in a STEM field while maintaining at least a 3.0 GPA. 

“When I was interviewing with admissions, my rep told me the Semmes seemed like a good fit for me. You have a separate application, you write a few essays, and I remember that there was a cool logic problem of how you would optimize an engine’s gas mileage. It was one of the only essays that I had for a college that was actually a chance to use your science knowledge,” Bass recalls. “I was selected, and that was awesome. It was the best news I’ve ever gotten.”

Without the scholarship, Bass says she might not have been able to come to Trinity. At another school, she says, “I would not have been afforded the same opportunities. I would have to really fight to be known by my professors, and I wouldn't have been as happy there as I am here, because the sense of community and the sense of belonging at Trinity is so important to me.”

Beyond the scholarship, Bass also can’t say enough about Trinity's facilities, especially the Center for Sciences and Innovation (CSI). Built in 2014, this $127 million project is the largest construction project the University has ever undertaken, and serves as the main hub for just about all things STEM on campus.

“I love CSI. I live here,” Bass laughs. “From an academic standpoint, the lab space and the equipment that we have available to us here at Trinity is fantastic.”

Embracing the Journey

Before Bass designed her own experiments, she needed to find a lab that worked for her. She started her Trinity journey aiming to be an engineering science major and joined the lab of engineering science professor Dany Munoz-Pinto, Ph.D.

Here, Bass conducted research on brain cells and how iron affects them, as an investigation into Alzheimer's disease pathology for the first two years of school. But engineering science wasn’t for her, so Bass says she switched to biochemistry. That’s the draw of the Semmes scholarship and the liberal arts: a flexibility to pursue new passions.

“I'm someone with really, really multifaceted interests,” Bass says. “I'm interested in everything. I love learning. And so I am one of those people that is in an English class and getting a Spanish minor and studying chemistry and biology.”

And throughout her winding journey, Bass says she’s felt supported by the Semmes family.

“One of the things that I didn't expect was how involved the Semmes family would be. I kind of just thought, ‘oh, they gave me this scholarship. They're probably just going to check in on me for my grades’. But every semester, we actually have lunch with them and they remember all of our names and they ask us how we're doing,” Bass says. “I've gotten emails from Dr. Semmes herself, just checking in on what I'm doing over the summer and things like that. I think that's really special, and it's nice to have an opportunity to get to know them and get to know the other Semmes students as well, because they’re all really, really cool unique people.”

 

Hands-on Faculty

That feeling of being seen as a unique person carries through to Bass’ experience with Trinity faculty.

“Here, my professors care about me. All of my professors know my name, know my major, know my interests. I see them in the hallways and we wave and we catch up. It's fantastic knowing that I'm ‘seen’ so much that Dr. Teague emailed me to give me a research opportunity when I didn't even tell them that I was looking for one - I wasn't in any of their classes. They just heard through the grapevine that I was looking for something, and they thought of me. A lot of things like that are possible because of that closeness between professors and students.”

That closeness puts students closer to lived experience in their fieds than a textbook ever will. Bass says she has loved Teague’s lab, which Bass says sits “kind of at the junction between biology and chemistry.”

Bass has also gotten to shape the project, which focuses on sampling a wild yeast in the Texas Hill Country called brewer’s yeast. “It's usually used to make beer and wine and things,” Bass says. “It lives on oak trees and we don't really know that much about its ecology at all.”

So, Bass wondered, what if scientists could learn more about where yeast lived? Then, she says the project spiraled into something bigger. “We've been developing a method that allows us to sample some sort of plant tissue, and then try to figure out proportionally what species are present. So that's been my project over the past summer,” Bass says. “It's been a lot of crazy chemistry.”

Shaping her own future

 “Designing a research project from ground zero with my lab partner, being the main drivers of that happening… I don't think that that would necessarily happen for undergrads at an R1 research institution,” Bass says. 

As Bass has come into her own as a scientist, she has started thinking about how research at Trinity also helps her make discoveries about herself.

For instance, Bass now knows she is someone who can chart her own path.

“I think it's a really big leadership skill to do your research, figure out both literature review and experimentation, then figure out what's going wrong, what’s happening, and then be able to be confident in that enough to say, ‘Hey, this is what I saw. I know that this isn't what we expected to see. Maybe instead of going in this direction, we should go in that direction,” she explains.

Make no mistake: big-time discoveries happen at Trinity, across just about every field you can imagine.

And most importantly, students here discover that they can do more than be part of a lab. Here, thanks to resources like the Semmes Scholarship, they can lead.