Cindy Liang: Graduate Student
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 mutations may interact to lead to cancer development by examining transcriptomic differences between cells double-mutant for U2AF1 and KRAS that have or have not been treated with cigarette smoke extract. Because my project involves both bioinformatics and molecular biology, I spend a lot of time talking with people from different fields–computer scientists, cancer biologists, and geneticists are just some examples of collaborators I and others in my lab work with. My favorite part about being a PhD student is being able to interact with and learn from the rich community of scientists at Santa Cruz. Post graduation, I hope to continue work in cancer biology by developing pharmaceutical interventions or diagnostic screens in industry.