When Dallas Fonseca decided his future career path involved science, he didn’t have far to look for a problem to solve. The Bridgeport, New York native had Onondaga Lake, infamous as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States, as a sort of inspiration.
Swimming and fishing had been banned for decades in the lake, which in recent years has undergone major cleanup efforts. But in 2010, another major environmental disaster gnawed at Fonseca: The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which resulted in the worst marine oil spill in history, affecting ecosystems at sea and impacting over 1,000 miles of coastline.
“I was like OK, these keep happening,” Fonseca, now a junior at Ithaca College majoring in both biochemistry and mathematics, said of these types of ecological disaster. “With my scientific interest, I want to be somebody who does something about this.”
He hopes to one day harness molecular biology and genetics to shape new ways to combat pollution that rely on natural organisms to clean up damaged ecosystems. Last month he received two big boosts toward that goal.
Fonseca was named a recipient of a prestigious-and competitive-Barry Goldwater Scholarship, one of the most distinguished awards offered in the sciences. He was also selected to be part of the renowned-and also competitive-Amgen Scholars Program, and will spend this summer working in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.