A Brief Time Abroad

Zapien was eager to expand her worldview by spending a semester in Australia. As a Biology of Global Health major, minoring in Studio Art, Zapien knew the value of understanding perspectives different from her own. 

“As a college student, our focus gets narrow so we forget that the world is bigger than our worries,” Zapien says. “I was hoping to learn more about diverse cultures and points of view by getting out of my comfort zone, and living a world away from home and the university.”

Australian school terms start later in the calendar year than in the United States, so Zapien did not begin her courses until late February. By the end of March, she was back home in Washington.

Out of the Frying Pan

Due to the time difference between Australia and the United States, Zapien did not receive the announcement to return home until the following morning. Though she was deeply saddened to leave after such a short time, Zapien knew it was the right thing to do. 

“Everything in Australia was still open at this point, so it felt strange to be returning to one of the places in the United States with the most confirmed COVID-19 cases at that time,” says Zapien. “But it was important to return home as quickly as possible for myself and others.”

Zapien was gold that she had to leave on Wednesday, March 18^th and had booked a flight for the following Tuesday. Unfortunately, her flight, like many others, was canceled, leaving Zapien only a few options. Eventually, she found a flight that left that Friday, March 20th, giving her just two days to pack. 

On her 24-hour return home, Zapien said that she no longer felt fully in reality. 

“I had a connecting red-eye from Honolulu that was incredibly tense,” says Zapien. “The plane was completely packed and you could tell that everyone was on edge.” 

After deboarding the plane, Zapien said she could feel a difference in the attitudes of the people around her. 

“In Australia, all of the restaurants were open and people were crowding the streets up until the day I left,” says Zapien. “in Bellingham, everything was closed. It felt like a different planet.”

Adapting to a New World

Even though the shift from her life down under to quarantining in Washington was sudden, Zapien said that Georgetown has made it easy to transition to online learning. In addition to her remote courses through the University of Sydney, Zapien is also taking two Georgetown courses.

In addition to Intro to Philosophy, Zapien is also enrolled in COVID-19: Theory and Practice in the Time of Pandemic, which has been particularly engaging for Zapien, and has made her feel as though she is learning essential material she could apply in the future. 

In her reflections on the present, Zapien said that her biggest takeaway from this experience has been the importance of living in the moment. 

“It’s so crucial to cherish everything you have when you have it, because you never know when it might go away,” Zapien says. “Even though this experience ended before it was meant to, I am so grateful for it, and look forward to returning and making more memories in the future.”

Click the links below to view parts two and three of our Returning Home from Abroad series

Returning Home from Abroad Part One: Delaney Corcoran Speaks to the Importance of a Positive Mindset

Returning from Abroad Part Two: Featuring Danielle Guida’s Journey Home from Italy

Adapting to Change

As the university moved to a virtual learning environment to halt the spread of COVID-19, students were asked to return to their permanent residences, including those 300 students who were studying abroad. 

Amid the rush to return home from locations all over the world, several Georgetown students found that the courses they were enrolled in abroad were canceled or greatly amended by their host institutions. This could have caused them to lose all of the credit they would normally have earned for that semester.

Vice Dean of Georgetown şŁ˝ÇÂŰĚł and Vice Provost for Education chose to combat this by creating the 

Students self-registered for this amended semester, selecting their classes from a list of 15 courses after consulting with their dean. Some of these classes fulfilled core requirements, while others were more specialized. COVID-19: Theory and Action in a Time of Pandemic (GUGC-0321) however, was an entirely new course created just for these students.

About the Course

professor, director of the Regents Science Scholars Program, created the new course.

“In our planning, we conceived of a team-taught, interdisciplinary course that would speak to this moment by focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic through multiple perspectives,” says Lorenson. “Professor Elmendorf pulled together an all-star cast of faculty from a myriad of disciplines and designed a spectacular curriculum for our students.”

Elmendorf assembled 18 different faculty members from nine different areas of study to take turns teaching the students individually or in pairs through modules that cover a variety of different subjects related to COVID-19. 

The modules cover topics such as the science of the virus and our responses to it, public health strategies, the lessons of history, the role of government, cultural perceptions and behaviors of people that produce risk and transmission. The course also looks at the political consequences of delaying action or ignoring public health.

Lemonade From Lemons

Georgetown şŁ˝ÇÂŰĚł Assistant Dean Mike Parker, who leads one of the modules on immunology, said he hopes the course will be “a synthesis of technical knowledge development, acquisition of multi-disciplinary perspective toward international crises, and self-reflection toward coming to terms with ongoing personal and collective pandemic predicaments.”

“Our new course, COVID-19: Theory and Action in a Time of Pandemic, is a prime example of making lemonade from the lemons our students have been given,” Parker says. “Giving these students the knowledge of how pandemics start, how we can resolve the issues that arise during pandemics and what we can do to prevent the next pandemic, should not only help them frame their current experiences within a broader worldview but also empower them to meet these challenges head-on in the future.”

There are currently 12 students enrolled in the course, which takes place every week through virtual Zoom meetings. The students have met with several of the professors in the few weeks since the start of the course and say they can already see the positive impact that it has had.

“I feel like I am being an informed citizen and also learning about something pertinent,” says Ryley Zapien (C’21) who just returned from studying abroad in Australia. “If this happens again, I feel like I could help based off the knowledge I have acquired in this course. I am grateful to Georgetown for giving us these wonderful online classes that have made it is easy to transition in such a chaotic time.”

Knowing the Enemy

P. falciparum is the most dangerous species of the human malarial parasites, as it is accountable for almost every death from malaria. For the past five years, Roepe and his colleagues have been working collaboratively to understand the structure of the PfCRT transporter, a membrane protein that is a major determinant of drug resistance in malarial parasites.

“Proteins are not rocks, they are very dynamic,” says Roepe.  â€śIn this case this protein makes malarial parasites resistant to drugs. It binds and transports certain drugs across a membrane where the drugs are then rendered ineffective. We want to test this overall process with detailed atomic–level structural data.”

In their research , Roepe worked with undergraduate and graduate students in addition to professors across universities. To begin, they used artificial pfcrt genes to make large amounts of PfCRT protein, which is essential for capturing its three-dimensional structure. This task alone took nearly twenty years to complete.

“Georgetown has the only lab to my knowledge that purifies all the different forms of this  protein,” says Roepe. “The work that Hangbang Zhang and Ellen Howard  in our group started back in 2000 to do this on the scale that is now possible was nothing short of heroic.”

Once the protein was purified, Roepe worked with Filippo Mancia, a professor at Columbia University, to capture the structure of PfCRT through cryo-electron microscopy and antigen-binding fragment technology. The lab is working now to combine this three-dimensional structure and their first-ever successful heterologous expression of a malarial parasite protein as described in their to further understand PfCRT function.

Roepe and his team are synthesizing this knowledge and finding strong evidence to suggest the location of mutations in PfCRT that contribute to CQ and PPQ drug resistance. Their research also suggests distinct mechanistic features that mediate resistance to CQ and PPQ. These data provide atomic-level insights into the molecular mechanism of this key determinant of antimalarial drug resistance.

Greater Implications

Approximately fifty percent of cases in Southeast Asia in which PPQ drugs were prescribed are not cured due to mutations in PfCRT. Previously, resistance to CQ drugs increased rapidly in the area, and appears to be related to PPQ resistance in unexpected ways. Roepe and his team are dedicated to continuing their research in the hopes of developing better drug therapy to counteract the effects of PfCRT mutations.

“Roughly 500 million people get malaria every year, and of those who die from the disease, most are children,” says Roepe. “Most of these deaths can be attributed to drug-resistant malaria. There are about 10 different malarial drugs currently in use, this protein is involved in resistance to half of them. We need to understand how this works to develop a therapy that kills drug-resistant malaria.”