Emma Copening

Emma Copening is from Roanoke, VA, majoring in BSE with a focus in biotechnology. In addition to this, she is also pursuing minors in Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering. Emma hopes that her education will lead her to a successful career in the pharmaceutical industry. 

Emma is an active member of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE). She also works as a lifeguard for Virginia Tech Rec Sports and conducts research on developing nanovaccines in the Zhang Lab. She began her time at Virginia Tech in Mechanical Engineering before making the switch to BSE, which allowed her to gain experience in medical device development as well as pharmaceutical creation. 

This summer, Emma interned for Novartis, a company focused on introducing new gene and cell therapies for many rare diseases. In this role, she was able to conduct studies to help improve the development of new drug formulations by creating a model that is able to predict the stability of drug formulations in shorter time frames. In addition to this, she was able to gain experience in many different lab protocols common to pharmaceutical production processes and was able to gain insight into the life cycle of drug formulation projects. 

In her free time, Emma enjoys crocheting and spending time with her friends and family. She is passionate about mentoring incoming BSE students because she feels she has valuable insight into the program and knows how helpful a program like this is to new BSE students. She is excited to be a mentor and share all about her experiences as a Biological Systems Engineering Student!