Reece Gardner

Reece grew up in Southeast Iowa in a small town called Mount Pleasant. He earned a B.S. in biochemistry and minor in pharmacology/toxicology from Iowa State University in 2023. At Iowa State, he conducted research in the lab of Brett VanVeller where he installed thioamides in the backbones of peptides. During the summer of his junior year, he went to the University of Kansas to perform research in the lab of Christian Schoneich. At Kansas, he investigated photoinduced oxidative modifications to proteins. Throughout college and the summer before coming to Madison, Reece also worked at Zymosense Inc., a startup company in Ames, Iowa. There, he helped the company with developing enzyme activity assays using the fluorescence of carbon nanotubes as a reporter. In his free time, Reece loves to watch college football and struggles to reconcile that he grew up an Iowa Hawkeye fan yet went to Ames for college.