Department of Biology Celebrates Hannah Snyder as Newly Named ARCS Scholar

The Department of Biology is thrilled to announce that Ph.D. student Hannah Snyder has been named a prestigious ARCS Scholar by the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation.

This highly competitive, nationally recognized honor is awarded to academically outstanding undergraduate and graduate students who demonstrate exceptional promise in science, technology, engineering, and medical research. The funding provided by the ARCS Foundation will directly support Hannah’s doctoral research, granting her the financial freedom to innovate and push the boundaries of her field.

Hannah is a dedicated graduate researcher in the Zarrella Lab, where her work focuses on the sophisticated mechanisms of competition within bacterial communities. Utilizing a powerful combination of bioinformatics and systems biology, her doctoral research seeks to unravel the molecular rules that govern mechanisms of intraspecies competition.

By applying these advanced computational approaches to understand how microbes compete and coexist, Hannah’s work aims to address critical, real-world challenges in infectious disease and pathogen biology.

Before joining the doctoral program at Georgetown, Hannah built a formidable interdisciplinary foundation. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from Georgia Tech, where she explored fields spanning microbiology and computational toxicology. She then went on to complete her Master’s degree in Bioinformatics at Georgia Tech, using metagenomic approaches to study viral diversity in coastal salt marsh ecosystems.

“As a rising third year student in the Biology Ph.D. program, Hannah is perfectly positioned to benefit from being an ARCS Scholar,” said Dr. Tiffany Zarrella, Principal Investigator of the Zarrella Lab. “The proposal she developed bridges wet-lab microbiology with computational analysis with the potential to reveal new targets for therapeutics as well as inform on the designs of antimicrobials. This award ensures she has the resources to accelerate her vital infectious disease research.”

The ARCS Foundation’s mission is to advance science in America by fueling the next generation of visionary researchers. By providing scholars with financial independence, the foundation empowers scientists like Hannah to focus entirely on discovery.

Please join the entire Department of Biology community in congratulating Hannah on this outstanding achievement! We look forward to watching her research continue to unfold.