Knight Campus Undergraduate Scholar Alonso Cruz won the second place $750 prize in the undergraduate category of the Fund it Forward Student Video Challenge, a student video competition presented by the Science Coalition.

"I'm deeply honored and humbled to be selected as the national runner up in this competition," Cruz said. "Just knowing that I had a community of family, friends, colleagues, mentors, advisors, and so many others supporting me through this process is the biggest win that I could ever ask for."

A junior human physiology major from Beaverton, Ore., Cruz focused his video on research he and his lab partners are doing in the Hosseinzadeh Lab designing proteins using computational methods. Their hope is to design peptide binders that can be used as a detection model in biosensors to identify gum disease, which affects more than half of Americans age 30 or older.

“In the future, will be able to detect the early stages of periodontal disease, thereby reducing the incidence of gum disease and improving the quality of life for massive amounts of people,” Cruz explains in his video, which he produced largely by himself using a GoPro video camera. For more, see the story on the Knight Campus website.