Month: April 2021

Lab / Organization: Gensun Biopharma For my fellowship, I worked in Dr. Seth Rubin’s lab, exploring the relationship between a family of tumor suppressor proteins and DNA transcription factors and how the interaction between these proteins plays into cell cycle control and tumorigenesis. Dr. Rubin’s Lab was a great learning environment with talented people, and…

Lab / Organization: Cepheid I investigated how viral envelope protein glycosylation variances introduced by in vitro expression systems commonly used for commercial vaccine development affect vaccine antigen immunogenicity and antigenicity during my fellowship year. Now, I work on development of in vitro diagnostic tests for infectious disease, which I am thrilled to be working in.…

Lab / Organization: Resilience I spent my fellowship research year studying Neanderthal variation in modern humans. Neanderthals and human populations interbred during a period of human evolution, which introduced Neanderthal-derived mutations into human genomes. These variants are still kicking around in human populations today. My research was aimed at identifying those Neanderthal variants that have…

Lab / Organization: Ultra Low Loss Technologies During the QB3 Fellowship year I was working on designing and testing Optofluidic biosensor devices which uses multi-mode interference photonic waveguides for multiplexed diagnostics applications. The fellowship funded my research, paid tuition fee and helped me buy essential text books & lab supplies. My current research is on…

Lab / Organization: Molecular Informatio Systems Lab, University of Washington During my fellowship year, I worked on developing nanopore technology for single-molecule protein sequencing. My research borrows from nature to build better computing systems. I want to make molecular computing useful in the real world.

Lab / Organization: Tessera Therapeutics My fellowship research focused on the bacterial type three secretion system (T3SS), a needle-like apparatus used by dozens of bacterial pathogens to cause disease. I developed and carried out a high throughput screen for chemicals that block the T3SS, leading to my discovery of the small molecule inhibitors known as…

Lab / Organization: Applied Optics Group at UCSC During my fellowship year, I was a part of the research based on solid-state nanopore integrated optofluidic devices. There were two major research projects I worked on. The first project was to develop an on-chip, high-throughput single-molecule analysis platform by incorporating a programmable feedback circuit with nanopore…

Lab / Organization: Saltikov lab – UCSC I was a rotation student my fellowship year. I rotated through the Saltikov lab which studied environmental microbiology, the Yildiz lab which studied pathogenesis, and the Lowe lab that does tRNA bioinformatic research. I ended up choosing Chad Saltikov’s lab where I began my thesis research on how…

Lab / Organization: UC Santa Cruz For my fellowship year, I worked with Professor Nader Pourmand on advancing his nanopipette work during the Fall quarter, followed by Professor Mark Akeson in the Winter quarter on understanding single-channel nanopore technology, and Professor David Haussler in the Spring quarter on assessing kmer-based haplogrouping of centromeric arrays. My…

Lab / Organization: Brooks Lab, UCSC In my fellowship year, I tested a pipeline to detect cancerous exon skipping events in immortalized tracheobronchial epithelial cells by growing mixes populations of wild-type and mutant cells in soft agar, a substrate that selects for oncogenic growth. My current project’s goal is to investigate how cigarette smoke and…