How do you top off an undergraduate career that earned two of the nation’s top awards?

If you’re Ariel Gale ’20, who graduated with a degree in chemistry, you spend your last semester, during a pandemic, working hard to publish a paper in an international peer-reviewed journal, adding your expertise to the body of knowledge so you and other scientists can build on the work.

And then you do it again, this time as first author, an honor given to the researcher who did most of the heavy lifting on the work being published.

And then you do it again, with your research group in computational chemistry, led by Professor George Shields. And … then you publish a fourth paper, again as first author.

How did it feel? “It was awesome,” said Gale, who now is a doctoral student at Emory University. “It was definitely the hardest and most rewarding thing I did as an undergrad.”

Ariel Gale ’20 meets with George Shields, chemistry professor, in the computational chemistry lab. Gale was a Goldwater and Beckman scholar and went on to a PhD program at Emory.

Gale, a Goldwater Scholar and a Beckman Scholar, each award given to outstanding undergraduate science majors, started working in Shields’ lab the summer before her junior year helping explore the beginning of life on Earth.

Their fundamental question was how proteins first appeared. Proteins are the “building blocks of life.” Made up of long chains of amino acids called polypeptides, proteins are present in