Sample Nsf Fellowship Recommendation printable pdf download

Sample NSF Fellowship Recommendation

December xx, 20xx

To the Fellowship Selection Committee:

I am writing in support of Janet Lerner’s application for an NSF Fellowship. Janet is genuinely a

gifted student with great potential as a research scientist. I encourage you to give her your most

careful consideration.

Janet has been conducting an independent honor’s research project in my laboratory for the past

year. Without a doubt, Janet is one of those rare individuals that comes along only once every few

years; she is highly intelligent (her transcript is blemished by a single “B”), inquisitive, motivated,

and creative. Janet has just the right combination of assertiveness and respect to make her a joy to

work with in the lab. She takes directions very well, but she is not timid about questioning

experimental details or rationale. This is a student that I will enjoy watching develop into a highly

productive research scientist.

For her honor’s thesis I have given Janet a demanding project that I would normally reserve for my

graduate students. Even before entering my lab, she had read a large number of articles that

described recent advances with the virus that we study in the lab—JC virus (JCV). Expecting that I

would need to explain many of the techniques used in these studies and to discuss the rationale

behind the experiments, I was surprised to discover that she already had a firm grasp of these

concepts and was ready to discuss the science on a much higher level. Together we decided that her

project would entail a mutational analysis of a specific functional domain of the major regulatory

protein of JCV, the multifunctional T protein.

To emphasize the scope and importance of Janet’s work, a summary of the relevant science follows.

JCV is an important opportunistic pathogen; it has infected >70% of the world’s population and it

remains latent in the kidneys and brains of most of us. In severely immunocompromised individuals,

JCV may cause the fatal demyelinating brain disease progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy

(PML); PML is now the cause of death in up to 7% of AIDS patients. An important question related

to the pathogenesis of PML revolves around the mechanisms of latency and reactivation of JCV in

the body. Many of our earlier studies have pointed to the T protein as a major player in these

phenomena. We now believe that this protein contributes to the restricted host specificity and

inefficient DNA replicating activity of the virus.

Based upon work with the related monkey virus SV40, we have lately begun to focus our attention

on a zinc finger domain of the JCV T protein. This domain is thought to play a role in forming a

double hexameric structure of T that facilitates appropriate interaction with viral DNA sequences at

the replication origin. We believe that differences in the consensus sequence of the JCV T protein

zinc finger affects its ability to efficiently replicate the viral genome and to establish latency.

Sample Nsf Fellowship Recommendation