WVU student researcher finds a future in the familiar

For West Virginia University undergraduate researcher Kasia Jaczynska, who grew up in Morgantown, “WVU has always felt like home.”

But even here on her home turf, Jaczynska has never stayed in her comfort zone.

Now a senior, she came to WVU fascinated by chemistry and the access that discipline gave her to the invisible world of molecules and atoms.

“I really loved it,” she recalled. “It wasn’t that it was easy — it wasn’t — but I was drawn to it. I loved thinking about how all those tiny pieces fit together.”

But Jaczynska kept pushing forward, encouraged by her father, Jacek Jaczynski, to go after the unfamiliar.

A professor of food science and human nutrition at the WVU Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Jaczynski encouraged his daughter to explore biochemistry. Th