At a Glance
Year: '26
Major: Political Science and Biology
Activities: Honors College, River Hawk Scholars Academy, Immersive Scholarship
Political science and biology major Sean Simonini grew up in a trailer park in Billerica, Massachusetts, in the gritty, blue-collar section of a mostly middle-class town.
His dad is a carpenter, and his mom works in a hotel. As a teenager, Simonini saw how his parents struggled to budget, buy a home and save for retirement. They had never learned basic money management skills – and neither had he.
Simonini, a top student, vowed to change that for himself and other high school students, first in Billerica and then statewide. First, he got elected to the Billerica School Board and co-founded the Massachusetts Association of Student Representatives.
Next, he interned in U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan’s Lowell office. Then he campaigned for state Rep. Ryan Hamilton ’20.
In the summer of 2023, after his first year at UMass Lowell as a political science major, he used a $4,000 Immersive Scholarship to intern for Hamilton and drafted a bill to require every high school in the state to offer financial literacy education. It passed the Joint Committee on Education but did not come up for a vote in the House. Hamilton reintroduced the bill in 2025.
View: Sean Simonini supports a bill that would make a financial literacy class a requirement for every student in every district.
By that time, Simonini was already working on a new goal: helping to treat or cure amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disease that had killed close relatives on both sides of his family.
At the suggestion of Political Science Prof. Jeffrey Gerson, he visited the Veterans Administration-Boston University-Concussion Legacy Foundation Brain Bank, which has brains donated by former athletes, veterans and others who suffered from neurodegenerative diseases and conditions like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is caused by multiple hits to the head.
A doctor showed him a slide of the brain of someone who had died from ALS. It was a light-bulb moment.
“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.
Simonini decided to double-major in biology to study neurodegenerative diseases. In the summer of 2024, he interned at the Boston University CTE Center. He also worked in UML Asst. Prof. Rachel Melamed’s computational biology lab. That included helping with a “really cool partnership” between Melamed and the brain bank to analyze patient samples for genetic risk factors for developing CTE.
In addition, he took on another internship at UMass Chan Medical School with Neurology Assoc. Prof. Nils Henninger, looking at a gene that affects the progression of both ALS and traumatic brain injuries.
That continued during his junior year, when he also worked as a research assistant in the Harvard University lab of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology Prof. Lee Rubin, helping postdoctoral fellow Rich Giadone ’15 examine brain aging processes that are similar to neurodegenerative diseases and doing his own experiments on ALS.
Simonini’s research efforts – he is an author on one published paper and is working on another – were recognized in 2025 with a $7,500 Goldwater Scholarship. The national scholarship aims to encourage and support college sophomores and juniors in STEM who show exceptional promise as future researchers.
“I’m not going to find the cure for ALS overnight, but I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t try,” he says.
Simonini chose UMass Lowell over several other public and private universities in part because he was offered the Immersive Scholarship and the opportunity to join the River Hawk Scholars Academy, UML’s support program for first-generation college students.
But mostly, he says, he liked UML’s diversity – and the university’s reputation.
“UMass Lowell is about the grit, the work ethic,” he says. “It’s everybody on an equal playing field. I love that mission.”