Iowa’s 2009 Glamour Winner
Alexandra Keenan
In the issue for October 2009, Glamour magazine led a feature story on the year’s “Top 10 College Women Competition” with a full-page photograph of “The Scientist” — Honors senior and Presidential Scholar Alexandra Keenan from Urbandale, IA.
Keenan is a senior who plans to become a physician and scientist. She is set to graduate from Iowa with three bachelor’s degrees: one in Biomedical Engineering, one in Biochemistry, and one in International Studies. Her goals include developing new treatments for diseases and providing them to people in underserved areas that reach from Iowa around the world. She adds that, “I would also like to advocate for the social programs that are necessary to ensure these treatments are available to those who need them most.”
From Honors at Iowa, Keenan has won the 2008 Vice President for Research Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research in the Natural Sciences. Her work on “Identification and Characterization of Vaccine Candidates for Visceral Leishmaniasis” was mentored by Professor Mary Willson in Internal Medicine.
Throughout the summer of 2009, Keenan worked at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India. There she researched screening programs for cervical cancer, while she taught Indian scientists a technique for detecting Leishmania parasites in human blood.
Keenan also participated in a 2007-08 winter program in India, sponsored in part by Honors at Iowa and organized by Geography Professor Rangaswamy Rajagopal. This experience has had Raj telling people how Ali keenan is one of the brightest and most caring students he has encountered in more than three decades of teaching and advising.
In addition, Keenan is one of fifteen Iowa Engineering students honored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for a first-place project in the 2008 competition for P3 Awards. Keenan and her colleagues designed an inexpensive, hand-held device to make bleach for use in sanitizing drinking water. As Craig Just, the group’s faculty advisor from Civil and Environmental Engineering, has observed, this device is literally a life-saver, since many in underdeveloped countries lack access to the safe water that the device generates.