This past summer, Pascack Hills senior Hyunjun “Fred” Lim attended The New Jersey Governor’s School in the Sciences. The program is a free three-week residential summer program where students are immersed in intense college-level research on the campus of Drew University. 

Select high school students who live in New Jersey are nominated by their schools for application for The New Jersey Governor’s School. Applications are then submitted in the fall of the student’s junior year for participation the following summer. Lim was one of only 60 students who were admitted. 

In the program, Lim took three college-level courses: Neurobiology, Medicinal Chemistry, and Biology of Cancer, along with a lab course in organic chemistry. 

Lim also participated in a team project in biochemistry. The group researched Aldo-keto reductase, an enzyme that plays an important role in biosynthesis processes and catalyzes the reduction of a wide range of carbonyl-containing substrates through the oxidation of NADPH to NADP+. 

“The reaction velocity/rate of AKR enzymes is sometimes reduced at higher concentrations of the substrate due to a phenomenon known as substrate inhibition, in which the enzyme is inhibited by its own substrate,” said Lim, “Therefore, it would be advantageous to find methods to reduce substrate inhibition in order to ensure maximum efficiency for biosynthetic processes. The purpose of our study was to determine more effective methods of preventing substrate inhibition of AKRs.”

This project culminated in a co-authored research paper entitled “Exploring the Kinetics and Inhibition of Yeast Aldo-Ketoreductases” that was presented in the David Miyamoto’s Conference—a symposium at the end of the program. 

“The most significant takeaway was the integral role that teamwork plays within the scientific field. Without collaboration, it would be impossible to conduct the large amount of research done,” said Lim upon reflecting on the experience.