Emma Glass’s parents both work in the STEM field, with her father being a doctor and her mother having a PhD in microbiology. She was surrounded by science from a very early age, but her preferred area of science leaned toward nature as a child.

Glass, a Metro Washington ARCS Scholar, grew up hiking and being immersed in the outdoors.

“For most of my childhood and teen years, I thought that was the direction I was headed on my journey with science,” Glass says. “I ended up switching my major halfway through college, because I realized that I liked math a lot more than I originally thought. I also figured out that I liked the biomedical field because I felt like it had a more direct impact on people.”

She could see the direct results of her work in the lab and how it affected people’s daily lives. She pursued her PhD in biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, where she joined the Computational Systems Biology Lab.

“Our lab focuses on metabolic modeling in general, but each person in the lab studies different systems such as cancer or microbes,” Glass says. “I specifically use metabolic modeling to create models of bacterial pathogens. I have developed these large collections of bacterial metabolism models to address medical questions.”

Glass’s biggest project focused on using genome sequences of all known bacterial pathogens to create metabolic models of each one through a computational pipeline that she developed.

“With nearly 1,000 models of bacteria, we are able to simulate how the microbe behaves in a computerized environment,” Glass says. “Some of the bacteria are difficult to grow in the lab environment, this enables us to ask questions that we couldn’t ask otherwise.”

Her specific goal was to identify shared traits across groups of bacteria to identify new antibiotic targets.

“Identifying these unique signatures of pathogens could actually be used as targets for location-specific antibiotic usage,” Glass says. “The antibiotics prescribed by doctors are typically broad, which will affect any microbe living in your body – good or bad.”

Glass’s interactions with ARCS has encouraged her as a researcher.

“I have really enjoyed the community that I found through ARCS,” Glass says. “I love talking to people who are excited about my research, because I sometimes lose sight of how impactful it truly is. It speaks volumes to someone just getting started in their research career to see others take an interest in what I’m doing.”