Carnegie Mellon University
January 16, 2025

MSCB Student Chosen for Inaugural Cohort of Rales Fellows Program

By Stacey Federoff

Cassia Crogan
  • University Communications & Marketing
  • 412-268-9295

Three first-year master’s degree students chosen as part of the inaugural cohort of the Carnegie Mellon University Rales Fellows Program saw opportunities for research and innovation where traditional fields meet.

Their work aims to pioneer 3D printing techniques that can aid in disaster relief, explore new battery materials to contribute to decarbonization technologies, and apply machine learning techniques to accelerate drug testing and discovery.

Cameron DreweryNisha Shah and Nathan Odonkor are among a class of 22 pursuing graduate degrees at Carnegie Mellon through the Rales Fellows Program. Launched in 2023, the program is dedicated to cultivating the next generation of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) leaders while also increasing access to graduate-level education.

Nathan Odonkor aims to develop algorithms for drug discovery

While earning his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech, Odonkor mainly focused on the development of medical devices. 

“I’ve always had an ache to understand things, and as I got into biology, I saw how the smaller you go, the more complicated things get, just like the world’s greatest puzzle,” he said.

After graduation, he decided to go a different direction, working in the biotech industry for three years in Boston.

He found rewarding work related to CAR T-cell therapy, a type of cancer immunotherapy, developing immunological assays.

“It was exciting working in a new city and field, but I wanted to try something new and expand my career option,” he said. “I fell in love with the concept of drug discovery and development, so that’s what motivated me to apply for Carnegie Mellon’s combined program.”

Now, as a student in the program led jointly by the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department in the School of Computer Science and Department of Biological Sciences in the Mellon College of Science, Odonkor is working to develop algorithms for drug development.

Working through the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology, Odonkor said his research work in David Ryan Koes’ lab at the University of Pittsburgh has been a good fit, as its focus is also on democratizing science.

Specifically, Odonkor is working with a protein pocket similarity comparator. A protein's function depends on its amino acid composition, which creates specific binding sites with the shape, charge and chemical properties needed to perform its function, Odonkor explained.

“What we’re studying is: How can we assess protein binding pocket similarity in order to support structure-based drug development?” he said. “This is relevant to drug development because identifying similar protein binding pockets helps enable the repurposing of existing drugs and aids in the prediction of off-target effects.”

Odonkor said Carnegie Mellon’s pioneering influence and leading reputation as the main reasons he wanted to study and research at CMU.

“Given Carnegie Mellon's reputation in terms of computer science, I wanted to learn about developing algorithms and machine learning techniques that I could apply in the drug discovery space to rapidly accelerate the rate at which we’re able to identify therapeutic proteins,” he said.

So far, he’s also had introductory training at the Future of Engineering and Science Automation Initiative in Bakery Square that he hopes he can harness in the future, calling the experience “insightful” helping him in “realizing how to leverage automation for high throughput experiments.”

Even when he’s up working till 4 a.m. — “because I was jazzed, I was having a good time,” he said — Odonkor makes time to serve as social chair on the executive board of the Black Graduate Student Organization, play cello in the chamber orchestra and grow plants in his apartment he hopes to one day cultivate in a community garden.

“In everything I do,” Odonkor said, “I want it to be a self-perpetuating machine of creativity, growing community and inclusiveness.”