Even as she finishes up four extremely busy years as a foods and nutrition major,
senior Leah Ellis is still enthusiastic about the initial breakthrough that she said
really kicked off her undergraduate career.
Ellis was just a freshman, she said, when she joined the Highlander Research Rookies Program, in which students work alongside a faculty mentor but also mingle with each other
in larger groups.
“When I came into Rookies, I was really shy, and I did not have a desire to make friends,”
Ellis recalled. “But you’re in a room with nine or 10 other students … and you’re
all working on different stuff. And bonds formed as we all struggled over the same
research problems, just not the same research topics.
“That changed me as a person, made me want to talk to people about their interests
and make friends with the other students,” she continued. “With Rookies, our joke
now is that we always see each other, and it’s like best friends being reunited, but
you’ll never see us hang out because we’re all equally so busy.”
For Ellis, that’s putting it mildly. She’s spent much of her time at Radford researching
ways to evaluate and improve people’s health, particularly against heart disease.
In addition to her classes, she works as a research assistant at Virginia Tech’s Dietary
Assessment Laboratory in Blacksburg. Her shifts often start at 5 a.m., when she helps
with meal preparations, observing blood draws and conducting biological sample analysis.
A new project Ellis is involved with will soon see her collecting serum and plasma
from the center’s participants, testing inflammation markers like Interleukin-6 (IL-6)
and Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1).
On top of that, she’s also a longtime tutor at the Harvey Center for Learning and Writing and the president of Radford’s Student Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (SAND).
Following her freshman year, she undertook a Student Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) in which she sought to explore the use of the anti-inflammatory properties
of blueberries as a possible curb against heart attacks.
In 2023, Ellis became the first Radford University student tapped to attend Virginia
Tech’s Translational Obesity Undergraduate Research Scholars (TOUR-Scholars), investigating
the effects of non-nutritive sweeteners on glycemia, or glucose in the blood.
“It was really challenging at first,” Ellis recently said of her busy schedule, “because
I had to readjust my idea of ‘Here’s how I want to live my college life as a student.’”
That means she doesn’t get many opportunities to sleep late and must carefully budget
her time for socializing.
“This works for me because I feed off of being challenged every single day, whether
it’s by the unpredictability of working with human participants or trying to figure
out what’s going on with the data, or why things aren’t working out when they should.
But I enjoy the daily challenges. They fuel me to keep pushing forward.
Ellis graduates this month from the College of Education and Human Development and will pursue her master’s degree, a path that’s already fully funded by the George
Washington Carver Scholars Assistantship Program. Beyond that, she said, she’ll likely
go after a Ph.D.
“I have a ton of fun with the work I do. It can be frustrating sometimes, don’t get
me wrong, but I get to look back and realize, ‘Yeah, that was tough but totally worth
it,’” Ellis concluded.
“It’s in those moments that I realize just how much I love this – and honestly, I
can see myself doing this for the rest of my life.”
To learn more about Radford University's commencement ceremonies, visit www.radford.edu/commencement.
