Victoria is a rising senior at the University of Toledo, Ohio, majoring in Biochemistry with a minor in Biology. There, she earned the Barry Goldwater Scholarship through her organometallic synthesis chemistry research, developing safer opioid and opioid reversal drug alternatives under the guidance of Dr. Michael Young. As an Amgen Scholar, Victoria has joined the Kurdistani Lab in the Department Biological Chemistry at David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA. The Kurdistani Lab studies how chromatin biology, histones, and their modifications play a role in human disease. Recently, the Kurdistani Lab unveiled that the H3-H4 tetramer exhibits copper reductase activity, the product of which is trafficked and sensed intracellularly, highlighting a key characteristic of copper homeostasis: copper must be maintained in the Cu 1+ oxidation state to be distributed properly. The active site, while crucial, has not yet been imaged directly. This structural challenge is compounded by the mass constraint posed by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Thus, this summer, Victoria is working on incorporating a PA14 (derived from human podoplanin) epitope into an exposed H4 loop that can be bound by a Fab antibody, increasing the apparent molecular weight of the copper-bound tetramer, and enabling structural characterization. Victoria would like to extend her sincerest gratitude to her faculty mentor Dr. Siavash Kurdistani and graduate student mentor Evan Clark for their exceptionally warm welcomes and helpful insights, and to the Amgen Foundation for connecting her to amazing individuals whose dedication to research and community have invigorated her own curiosity and passion for biochemistry.