SENIOR PROFILE: Arianne Richard

While a campus tradition holds that the first person in each incoming class to find the owl carved into the Alma Mater statue will be valedictorian, Arianne Richard didn’t even look for it. To this day, she hasn’t seen the owl—but she was named Columbia College valedictorian regardless.

Richard, a biochemistry major, said she found out that she was valedictorian while sitting in a computer lab in the chemistry department. “I opened my email and I just started laughing. So I ended up in the stairwell, laughing and calling everybody I knew,” she said.

Her mother, Lisa Richard, wrote in an email, “As well as I know her, she still continues to amaze me with her determination and capacity to learn.”

With a GPA of 4.16, Richard said she previously had no idea where she stood academically in her class. She also received the award for the highest GPA—an honor that does not always go to the valedictorian, who is selected by a committee based on a number of factors in addition to grades.

While Richard has focused on science during her time at Columbia, she said she decided to attend partly because of the Core Curriculum. She named Elizabeth Scharffenberger, a lecturer in the classics department and her Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization professor, as one of her favorite professors.

“Arianne’s enthusiasm for the projects of Lit Hum and CC—her lively curiosity and breadth of interests, as well as her generosity of spirit and good will toward others—are what I will always remember and appreciate about her,” Scharffenberger wrote in an email, adding that Richard also has “an absolutely fantastic sense of humor.”

After graduation, Richard has a one-year position lined up with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and her research adviser—Ruben Gonzalez, an assistant professor in the chemistry department—convinced her to apply to a biophysics Ph.D. program in the fall. As a junior, she was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship, the most prestigious prize for undergraduates planning to pursue Ph.D.s in science or math. After school, she would like to either stay in academia or go into manuscript editing for a science publication.

Brent Stockwell, an associate professor in the biology department and Richard’s major adviser, taught her in a graduate-level genomics class, which Richard took in her junior year. “I was a little skeptical [of her age] going in,” he admitted, but “she was amazing in the class. She was right up in the thick of things with the graduate students.”

Stockwell added, “Of all the students, not only was she tremendously impressive in all her classes, but she was understated. She would never ask to be valedictorian.”

Richard said one of her best memories at Columbia is from when she attended the Lenfest Awards banquet—an event to honor committed professors—a few weeks ago, when Gonzalez was getting an award. She sat next to Martin Chalfie, chair of the biology department and a co-recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “He immediately asked me what I do, what I wanted to do,” Richard said. “He started listing off names of who he would contact for me in Boston. … He followed through with everything. He set me up with interviews in Boston without ever having me as a student.”

On campus, Richard has been involved in dance groups, including serving as co-chair of CU Dance Marathon, an annual fundraiser for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. The event lasts 28 hours, and last year, it raised over $51,000.

Alex Marchyshyn, CC ’10, described Richard as “fun, determined, and loyal.”

“She is always game for an adventure, whether it is pursuing gluten-free mac and cheese downtown or trying something we never have before,” Marchyshyn added.

Richard also works in a laboratory part-time. She said the research she has done with a graduate student is now ready to be published, and hopefully will be by fall.

Her mother said that she seems to have inherited her enthusiasm for science from her father, Marc Richard, who is an electrical engineer. “He began doing home experiments with her when she was three or four years old,” she said, “answering her questions with patience and allowing her to improvise to ‘see what happens if....”