Emre Tkacik is a fifth-year graduate student in Harvard University’s Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology (SSQB) program. He joined the laboratory of Michael Eck where he was awarded the Chleck Family Foundation Fellowship and has well as characterizing RAF inhibition by small molecule inhibitors. Prior to starting his graduate work, Emre received his B.S. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where he studied viral assembly of the HIV-1 retrovirus in Michael Summers laboratory. He was a Minority Access to Research Careers, Undergraduate Student Training in Research (MARC U*STAR), Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP), and Meyerhoff Scholar; as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Undergraduate Research Fellow.

For the summer of 2018, Emre joined the lab of Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School as part of the Summer Harvard Undergraduate Research Program (SHURP), and had the opportunity to present his work on characterizing peroxisomal protein import at that year’s Leadership Alliance National Symposium. During his graduate work, he has been able to provide mentorship to students across the country through Harvard’s University of Puerto Rico Mentorship, the SSQB Secondary Mentorship, and the SSQB application assistance programs. Now, five years later, he has the opportunity to act as a coordinator for the 2024 SHURP cohort, helping future scientists present their work at Leadership Alliance symposiums.