If
engineering
graduatestudent Emily Reed was asked to give advice to undergraduates, she would say, “Do your best in all of your work. You don’t know how useful something could be later on.”
Reed knows about this firsthand. While an undergraduate at UC Merced, she was a Regents Scholar, which she describes as “her biggest
scholarship.” She also won first place in the 2007 Research Days poster competition. And she was Student of the Year in 2004-05 at Merced College, which she attended for three years before transferring to UC Merced.
But wait. There’s more. At 14, Reed, who has played the violin for 13 of her 21 years, placed first in the Merced Symphony Youth auditions. She now performs with the Merced College String Orchestra.
And even though she probably won’t get awards for it, she also takes care of her four pet chinchillas and has a few dogs.
It’s probably no surprise that Reed chose to specialize in
bioengineeringbecause of its diversity.
“I have always liked the sciences,” she said – so much so that she had difficulty choosing between them as an undergraduate because she didn’t want to limit herself to just one. She enjoyed math, biology, chemistry, and physics, among others.
“Engineering is a useful way to incorporate ideas from multiple fields, and I appreciate the interdisciplinary approach that it promotes,” she said.
Her family has been her biggest inspiration. Her dad is a printer repairman, and her mom is a piano teacher. The youngest of three siblings, Reed has an older sister who is working on her Ph.D. in
chemistryat UC Davis and one brother, who has a degree in
physics, and is also a graduate student at UC Merced.
She also thinks very highly of her mentor, UC Merced Professor
Christopher Viney, for whom she does research, in addition to being a TA for an undergraduate class in
integrated calculus and physics.
Reed is a native of Merced, and, unless you count her commitment to her chinchillas and her dogs, she is single and unattached.
