This summer, while other students were working or taking classes or just enjoying their time off, Barak Meachem was conducting research at Harvard University.
Meachem, a senior double majoring in biomedical science and business administration at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), took part in the Du Bois Scholars Program.
Started in 2024, the program pays for a nine-week research internship at Harvard for students from select historically Black colleges or universities.
From June 3 to Aug. 7, Meachem studied the human coronavirus under the supervision of a faculty member at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
Specifically, he examined host cell (surface) proteins on the coronavirus to see if those proteins increased the likelihood of infecting other cells. Surface proteins on human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV, the precursor to AIDS) work this way.
“At the end of the nine-week program, I presented my research findings and discussed the experimental approaches we used to better understand how host-cell proteins may influence coronavirus infectivity,” Meachem said.
Summer internships are something of a tradition with Meachem, a Cheatham-White scholar who previously interned at East Carolina University, Duke University and MIT.
At Harvard, he lived in a residence hall, where he met people from around the country.
He also engaged in a variety of extracurricular activities while in Massachusetts, including seeing the W.E.B. Du Bois house, attending a Boston Red Sox game, looked through a space telescope, taking part in a trauma simulation with a Harvard medical student, visited New York city for a weekend, kayaked and visited local fraternity brothers from Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc.
After graduating in May 2027, Meachem aims to take a year off from schooling and work as a clinical specialist while applying to medical school. In the long term, he would like to have his own medical practice as an anesthesiologist and also become a venture capitalist specializing in medical devices or pharmaceuticals.