But she’s also a participant in a special program that lets her simultaneously seek a degree in music and biology — a combination that often surprised her “right-brained” fellow students at the school.

 

“The Jacobs School has a specific degree program that’s a bachelor’s in music and an outside field, and you can pick your outside field,” said Gerhing. “For me, when I was in high school and started thinking about college, I knew music was something I didn’t want to give up because I love it so much. But when I was in the sixth grade, we visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and there was this genetics exhibit with cloned mice. And it just clicked. I love it too.”

 

Gehring explains the program originated among dance students in Bloomington as a way to provide job security to majors whose careers are notoriously brief due to the physical rigors of the discipline.

 

“Ballet dancers’ careers are typically very short – and the injury rate is very high – so it was thought studying an outside field will help them in the long run,” she said. "Fortunately, the program’s since been made available to any student who gets into Jacobs.”

Gerhing’s first exposure to academic-level research took place this summer through Project SEED, an Indianapolis-based program sponsored in part by the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute that connects local students with researchers and labs at IUPUI, including many at the IU School of Medicine. Her mentor for this three-month experience was Timothy Corson, Ph.D., assistant professor of ophthalmology and of biochemistry and molecular biology at the IU School of Medicine.

 

Dr. Corson’s work aims to develop new therapies for retinoblastoma, a form of eye cancer that causes loss of vision or eyes in young children, with a specific focus on a single gene, called KIF14, which his previous research has identified as highly overexpressed in the cancer. Gehring’s job over the summer involved purifying catalytic proteins related to KIF14 in order to investigate their potential as a drug target.

 

“Protein purification itself is a bit monotonous and repetitive – it's a lot of centrifuging and re-suspending – but it was a great experience to get to learn and practice all these lab techniques. Just the feeling of being in the lab was wonderful.”

A soprano whose taken voice lessons since sixth grade, Gehring is now studying under Marietta Simpson, a faculty member at the Jacobs School who has performed with all the major orchestras in the United States and most of those in Europe. While she enjoyed earlier forays in musical theater, Gehring now enjoys singing opera and classical music.

 

“If music opens a door for me, I’d like to try and get my masters and perform wherever they’ll have me,” she said. “But biology-wise, if that’s the door that opens for me, I’d like to try and go for my Ph.D., or at least go as far as I can, and do research. I’m not just studying biology in case music doesn’t work out — it’s because I want to.”

 

But no matter how the future unfolds, Gerhring is confident that music, as well as science, will aways remain a part of her life.

“I would always do music on the side. There’s no way, once you’ve truly experienced music that you can ever give it up,” she said.

(Kevin Fryling also contributed reporting to this story.)