Andrew Linz

I am currently a high school student attending Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood Colorado as a concurrent enrollment student through Colorado Early Colleges Fort Collins. I am also enrolled in Red Rocks’ honors program through which I have practiced interdisciplinary methods of scientific communication, presented multiple times at the school’s biannual STEM Expo, and worked on a campus ecological project to catalogue campus wildlife and remove invasive species. I will be graduating with my high school diploma in May as my class Valedictorian and with an associates of science with a concentration in biology from Red Rocks Community College. In the fall, I will continue my education at the University of St Andrews in Scotland aiming to complete their five year Masters in biochemistry course. Currently, I am the president of the Pre PA & Pre Med club at Red Rocks and I am an active member of the Red Rocks Space Grant club. As a member of Space Grant I have participated on a student led research project to gather quantitative data on the triboelectric series at roughly zero atmospheres, and led an undergraduate research project of my own that aimed to determine the colonization rate of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in simulated Martian soil. Additionally, I completed a “DemoSat” project where I built a payload that was put onto a NASA high altitude air balloon to gather data on the concentrations of particulate matter at high altitudes. The results of my project were presented at the annual CU Boulder Research Symposium. Through my extracurricular activities and other projects, I have aimed to gain experience working in various scientific fields so that I will be better equipped to contribute to my chosen field.