Maria Filsinger Interrante, former captain of Stanford’s equestrian team, leads a group that recently won the $10,000 national prize for their work to develop a novel therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Maria Filsinger Interrante, who led a team of young scientists that recently won the prestigious $10,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in the “Cure It!” category, says participation in intercollegiate equestrian sports helps students learn to work as a team and as leaders.

Filsinger Interrante, a US Equestrian member who hails from Minnetonka, Minn., competed up to the one-star level in eventing before coming to Stanford and joining the equestrian team there during her college career. She rose to captain of Stanford’s dressage squad and president of the Stanford Equestrian Team as a whole, and she competed in both Intercollegiate Dressage Association shows and Intercollegiate Horse Shows Association Western competition before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering last year. As an undergraduate, she also led Team Lyseia, a three-person research team whose work in developing a potential new therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacteria netted the prestigious national Lemelson-MIT award in April.

“One of the coolest things about intercollegiate riding is that it’s team-based, whereas before college that had never been something that was part of my equestrian experience,” said Filsinger Interrante. “In IHSA and IDA, it really, truly is a team sport, and you need everyone’s contribution. That fosters so much cooperation. Everybody wants to help everybody else out if they can. On our team, some of the most experienced members who were competing at the open level will teach the walk-trot riders.

“Being a team member really teaches you to think outside of yourself and work for the collective benefit rather than for your own benefit,” she added. “As far as leadership, this is something that’s been incredibly useful in all aspects of life, but especially in science. You should work to understand what motivates people and what they’re in it for, so you can work to help make their personal incentives align with the incentives of the team.

“That’s been an incredibly useful leadership tool,” she added. “It’s the same with science. On our antibiotics team, for example, I’m the bioengineer, and we have a chemical engineer, and we have a chemist. I’m not good at the thing the chemist is good at, and vice versa, and we’re very cognizant of using everyone’s strengths as well as possible and filling in for each other’s weaknesses. And that was something that was important on the equestrian team: figuring out how to put all the pieces together in a way that makes the best whole.”

Team Lyseia’s project started last year as part of an entrepreneurship club focused on biotechnology. “The goal of the club was to spend a few months doing research, looking at where the gaps are in treatment and where new innovations might be necessary,” Filsinger Interrante explained.

As part of their work, Filsinger Interrante and her teammates visited with professors and local biotech people. The project culminated in a pitch to Stanford faculty and staff, as well as to local investors, who decided that Team Lyseia’s theoretical idea was promising enough to support with a $10,000 grant from within Stanford to launch the project’s scientific research.

Working in their spare time, Filsinger Interrante and her fellow researchers—Christian Choe and Zachary Rosenthal—produced the results that earned the Lemelson-MIT award. “It showed in a proof-of-concept way that this idea would be promising for actually rolling into a therapeutic,” Filsinger Interrante said. “Essentially, these are antibiotic proteins that we’ve engineered. We’ve tested them against E. coli, and now we’re going to test them against the species that we really care about going after—the ones that have the highest mortality rates.”

And Filsinger Interrante has a few tips for equestrians on ways to help reduce antibiotic resistance. “Triple-antibiotic ointment sometimes isn’t necessary for every cut,” she said. “Sometimes keeping it clean and maybe using some petroleum jelly is what’s helping the healing. Defer to your vet: they went to school to learn all of this, and if they say you don’t need the triple-kills-every-single-bug ointment, then don’t use it, because it’s actually a disservice to everyone whose horse actually gets one of those infections and can’t clear it.

“In terms of antibiotic stewardship, any time you pick up a product that says ‘antibacterial,’ make sure that that is a property you really need in that product. Soap is probably the most-used example, but also shampoos, products you’re using on the coat and the tail, figure out if that’s really what your horse needs. I’ve seen a lot of coat products that are touted as being antibacterial, but in reality, there are a lot of ‘bugs’ that aren’t impacting your horse in a negative way at all. There a lot of grooming products out there that you could use instead that give your horse the same benefit but would not essentially wipe out good bacteria—because there are also good bacteria.”

Filsinger Interrante is now working toward a joint M.D. and Ph.D. in Stanford’s Medical Scientist Training Program, and, although she’s no longer on the equestrian team, she still helps out at the university’s iconic Red Barn “Honestly, the proximity to horses is one of those things that was attractive about staying here,” she said.

Stanford’s riding program is based at an on-campus equestrian facility that is only a five-minute bike ride from Filsinger Interrante’s residence. That convenience made riding easier when she came to college as a freshman, and so did the number and quality of horses at Stanford, explained Filsinger Interrante.

“I was shocked by how high-quality the horses were and that people were willing to donate these horses to the program, considering how much potential they had for further competition,” she recalled. “That was great. You had horses who had competed a high level. We got a lot of retired upper-level hunter jumper horses, and that was incredible. It wasn’t a step down from the horses I had been riding in high school; it was on par, and in some cases the horses had been even better trained and done even more than the horses I had been riding. That was awesome.”

Stanford, like a number of colleges, also offers horsemanship classes that encourage first-time riders to get involved with horses, Filsinger Interrante said, which helped bring more students into horse sports for the first time. “Some of those students actually ended up being recruited for the team in our walk-trot division,” she said.

Stanford’s equestrian team generally has 30-40 members, Filsinger Interrante said, and has 20-30 horses at its disposal.

Filsinger Interrante noted that the skills athletes learn in the show ring and the stable translate into valuable life skills well beyond college, such as being able to plan ahead, adjust course, persist, and respond to and learn from setbacks.

“I think equestrian really nails that into you,” said Filsinger Interrante. “Because if you take every rail down or every 52 in dressage as a personal blow that means you’re not worthy or skilled, you’d just quit. By being able to know you’re doing your best, you’re working hard, you’re creating an incredible bond with your horse, you learn that it doesn’t matter so much if you didn’t win that particular day or didn’t complete today—and that’s a great lesson that’s allowed me to be a lot more positive about the way that I do research and the way that I ride.”

To learn more about both scholastic and intercollegiate riding opportunities, log in or join US Equestrian and visit the Scholastic Equestrian Programs page in the Learning Center.

 

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