Indiana University undergraduate Eduardo Duro has been named a Goldwater Scholar for the 2021-22 academic year. The honor recognizes outstanding college sophomores and juniors who show great promise in math, science, or engineering.
From an estimated pool of over 5000 students, 1256 were nominated by 438 academic institutions to compete for the 2021 Goldwater Scholarships. Duro was among the 410 students selected by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, the federally endowed agency that awards the coveted scholarships.
Duro, who is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is pursuing an honors degree in biology (B.S.) and an honors degree in Portuguese (B.A.) as well as a minor in chemistry.
He has worked on research projects in the laboratory of W. Dan Tracey, professor of biology, where Tracey and Lydia Hoffstaetter, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, served as his mentors. Projects with which Duro assisted included work on the nociceptive gene dubbed "smoke alarm," studies on Caribbean Drosophila related to melanization and the phenol oxidase cascade response in different Drosophila species, and research focused on Drosophila parasitoids.
Duro also devotes time to a self-devised research project he began last summer. From a fascination with day-flying moths and the iridescence they exhibit, Duro developed an interest in Lepidoptera and the mechanisms that regulate and give rise to wing color, color organization, and scale micro-structure. He hypothesized that perhaps developing structural coloration was a faster and simpler adaptation to transitioning to being diurnal than developing molecular pigmentation pathways.
The College of Arts