Carlos Barrios Perez

One of the attributes that I am most proud of is my ability to fluently write and speak in Spanish. This allows me to connect with so many more individuals and helps me keep my cultural heritage forever close within me. Moreover, outside of school I like to devote my time to researching in various fields of science. At OSU I was granted the opportunity to work directly under one of the longest standing professors within the Chemistry department. With him I worked on the development of new tandem reaction methodology for the synthesis of cyclic and heterocyclic compounds. I got the opportunity to run, workup, and purify reactions to then take Proton NMRs, C-13 NMRs, and Infrared Spectroscopy to verify if the reactions ran accordingly. Moreover, since the summer of 2020 as the world entered its lockdown due the pandemic, I got to serve as an undergraduate researcher with the medical informatics team at the OU-TU School of School of Community Medicine to battle against the issues this virus caused. We partnered with the Sooner Health Access Network to assess barriers to telemedicine among care managed Medicaid patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. As an undergraduate I knew I could not help on the front lines as many of our providers were doing therefore, I used my passions and skills to help in other vital ways. Now, both lines of research are actively in the last stages of drafting and submission for publishment which is something that I take great pride in. Likewise, my yearlong research endeavor to draft my Departmental Honors College thesis was centered around the Covid-19 virus as well. My study analyzed various lines of research which identified commonalities in concentration levels of biological markers to then establish a connection between their concentrations and how they relate to each other and disease progression. By following the viruss intricate path of infection and breaking down the various mechanisms which are known to us, I was able to provide an exemplar list of biomarkers which could serve as a primitive system towards monitoring patients. The overall goal of my research was to use the correlations between these biological markers and disease severity to help enable risk stratification, guide interventional studies to target patients at enhanced risk of developing severe cases and to optimize the allocation of limited human and technical resources during the ongoing pandemic.