Michael Nanfara is a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences Honors program, majoring in molecular biology and biochemistry. He is an undergraduate research assistant for Dr. Andrew Vershon at the Waksman Institute where he studies gene regulation in yeast. For this research, he received the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship and the Aresty Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Outside of the lab, he served as the peer mentor and First Year Interest Group Seminar (FIGS) peer instructor for the Health and Medicine discovery house program. Recently, he was selected to become an Aresty Peer Instructor for the 2013-2014 academic year. In his work for the Gardner fellowship, Michael is working with Peter Gillies, the director of the New Jersey Institute of Food, Nutrition and Health, to develop a framework to ethically utilize genomic technologies.