Bioinformatics Student Travels to Germany

Sophomore Curran Kelleher will be participating in a German exchange program this fall.

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Most students couldn’t even dream of spending an entire year studying, working and living in a non-English speaking country. Curran Kelleher, however, isn’t most students.

This fall, Kelleher will travel to Germany to begin a year of study through the UMass Lowell-Hessen German exchange program. Kelleher is a sophomore computer science major with a bioinformatics concentration. He will spend the month of September in the Language and Cultural Studies program at Justus Liebig University, in Giessen, Germany. After September, Kelleher will begin studies at Technische Universität Darmstadt.

Along with studying and learning about the German culture, Kelleher will also be working at the Zentrum für Graphische Datenverarbeitung (ZGDV), a computer graphics research organization in Darmstadt.

Kelleher is one of the top students in the UMass Lowell bioinformatics program, and has been doing research on campus for almost two full years.

“Before I was even a freshman, I was involved in research at UMass Lowell,” says Curran. “I came to an open house the summer before my first semester, where I met the bioinformatics director. He offered me a job because I showed so much interest in the subject.”

Kelleher explains, “I am tremendously excited about the potential of life, about learning and growing. Therefore I believe it is the perfect time to travel, to see how people are living and what reality is on the other side of the world.”