04/17/2025
By Katharine Webster

Sean Simonini, a political science major who was already working on passing a financial literacy bill at the Massachusetts State House, had a revelation on a visit to the Boston University-Veterans Administration-Concussion Legacy Foundation brain bank in Bedford.

His aunt on his father’s side and his grandfather on his mother’s side of the family had both died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal disorder caused by the death of motor neurons, the brain and spinal cord cells that control movement.

A doctor showed Simonini a slide from the brain of someone who had died from ALS, and that changed everything. The sophomore decided on the spot to double-major in biology.

“This was a wake-up call that there was this whole other set of issues I couldn’t solve at the State House,” he says. “I’m not going to find the cure for ALS overnight, but I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t try.”

Image by Rich Giadone

In the year and a half since, Simonini has interned at the BU-VA Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center and worked in labs at UMass Lowell, UMass Chan Medical School and Harvard University. He’s an author on one published research paper and is working on another.

He just won a prestigious scholarship to support those efforts. The $7,500 Goldwater Scholarship aims to support college sophomores and juniors majoring in STEM disciplines who demonstrate promise as future researchers.

Simonini says he’s honored – and excited to become part of the Goldwater Scholars community, which includes more than 3,000 researchers and students who have received the national scholarship since it was launched in 1989.

“The biggest game-changer is having access to this amazing group of individuals,” he says. “It helps with mentor-mentee relationships, programming, applying for Ph.D.s – which I’ll be doing over the summer – networking and resources.”

Simonini, who grew up in Billerica, Massachusetts, came to UMass Lowell because he liked the campus’s work ethic and diversity. He was also offered admission to the Honors College and the River Hawk Scholars Academy, the university’s support program for first-generation college students.

He accepted both, along with a $4,000 Immersive Scholarship, which students can use to do research with faculty, study abroad or do a community service project after their first year of college.

Simonini chose the third option. The son of a carpenter and a hotel worker, he had seen how his parents struggled to budget, buy a home and save for retirement, and he realized he didn’t know anything about personal finance.

Image by Courtesy

He was already on a mission to require financial literacy education, first at his own high school – Billerica Memorial High – and then statewide. He’d begun building a political network and experience, first by interning for U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan’s office in Lowell and then by campaigning during the fall of his first year at UML for state Rep. Ryan Hamilton ’20.

Simonini used his Immersive Scholarship to work in Hamilton’s office on a financial literacy education bill during the summer of 2023. The bill passed the Joint Committee on Education but did not come up for a House vote in 2024. Hamilton reintroduced it this year.

Simonini is still active in policy work – he’s chair of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MassPIRG) board – but increasingly, his focus has turned to research on ALS and related neurodegenerative disorders.

In summer 2024, Simonini interned part time at the BU-VA-CTE Center.

The brain bank began as a repository for brains donated by former athletes. Many suffered from CTE, a condition caused by cumulative hits to the head and traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). CTE progresses over decades and has symptoms similar to dementia and ALS.

Simonini also worked for UML Asst. Prof. Rachel Melamed, a computational biologist, including on a joint project between Melamed and the brain bank that involved crunching genetic data from the bank’s samples to see if certain genetic factors stimulated the onset of CTE.

That summer, he also interned on nights and weekends in the UMass Chan Medical School laboratory of Neurology Assoc. Prof. Nils Henninger, looking at the role of a particular gene in protecting the brains of mice from both the progression of ALS and the cumulative effects of TBIs.

“That was a really cool opportunity, because I had a chance to look at the nexus of two diseases,” he says.

As a junior, he has kept on working with Henninger while also interning in the laboratory of Prof. Lee Rubin in Harvard University’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. There, Simonini is supervised by Rich Giadone ’15, a postdoctoral researcher who is studying diseases of the aging brain.

Image by Courtesy

Giadone, a first-generation college grad and Kennedy College of Sciences alum, says he wanted to give Simonini the same opportunities that others had offered to him.

“Sean is an impressive kid for a number of reasons,” Giadone says. “It’s been super-rewarding watching him grow from his first day in the lab to seeing him talk with other scientists in the hall about projects they’re working on.”

Using pluripotent stem cells from ALS patients that have been induced to turn into motor neurons with the disease, Simonini has been testing anti-aging treatments that those other researchers are developing to see if they can improve the function of the ALS cells.

And that’s just the beginning. Simonini is also analyzing data for Giadone, and he’s full of ideas for future research projects. Giadone says he looks forward to seeing what Simonini does next.

“He’ll message me in the middle of the night about various project proposals – and I’ll respond,” Giadone laughs.