“I started liking science at a young age,” shared Daria Balashova, an undergraduate researcher in the Trader Lab. “I would watch a lot of documentaries and TED Talks (about anything and everything). Around 8th or 9th grade I took a liking to chemistry because it’s quite literally all around us — in our food, in our medicine, in our clothes, and in ourselves.”
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Balashova received a scholarship to a San Diego private high school and moved to California to complete her junior and senior year.
When it came time to begin the college application process, she searched for universities with plentiful research opportunities for undergraduates and selected UC Irvine: “When I got my acceptance letters, I chose UCI for its faculty (most are doing research in different chemistry areas, so there are a lot of perspectives and niches to learn from) and resources, specifically the laboratories. We even have a nuclear reactor, which is so cool!”
She entered her freshman year knowing she wanted to study chemistry but unsure of the particular research areas she was interested in exploring.
“I got to thinking about which classes spark me and what I can study for hours,” she said. “I realized I loved synthesis problems in organic chemistry, so I looked for a lab that would give me the ability to do that in real life.”
She then joined the Trader Lab, where researchers study “the development of chemical strategies to control and harness proteasome-mediated protein degradation.”
“The project that I have been working on with my mentor is targeted protein degradation using the 26S proteasome,” she explained. “It involves creating bifunctional molecules that can bind to a specific site of the 26S proteasome as well as to the protein of interest (the one that we want to degrade) and force the proteasome to degrade the protein of interest (POI). This can be helpful in disease states such as cancer or Alzheimer’s.”
Along with Dr. Trader and her graduate student mentor Timothy Harris, Balashova will spend the summer synthesizing derivatives of a known rpn-13 binder (TCL-1) and testing them using cell culture as a student who was chosen for the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) fellowship through the UCI Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).
“This award is an important opportunity. It allows me to work on my own project over the summer, as well as present my findings at the next Undergraduate Research Symposium at UCI in the spring. I believe it will help me develop the independent research skills necessary for a lifetime in science as I work my way towards graduate school,” said Balashova, who will graduate in Spring 2026 with her BS in Chemistry. Following graduation, she plans to pursue a PhD in Synthetic Chemistry.
“Although I wasn’t initially interested in pharmaceutical science specifically, the idea of being able to make a molecule that can influence human health amazes me,” she said. “I think it’s neat that changing a small part of a molecule can maybe change the outcome of a disease. It’s crazy that we can connect things and build complex systems of atoms — sort of like Legos!”
