It definitely is exciting to wake up and come to work every day and know that
I'm actually a researcher now.
It's just exciting to know that I'm doing could actually be impactful and be presented to the public some day.
Emily is a Postdoc in the (Bill) Cresko Lab who has been mentoring me since I first started doing research.
Since then she's taught me so many technical skills
but also just what it means to be a scientist
and especially what it means to be a woman in science.
The research we're doing in the lab
is laying the foundation for understanding the immune system in threespine stickleback fish
and then using that knowledge
we can move forward on studying diseases in different immune genes
and then being able to translate that into humans and that can be used universally.
The Knight Campus Undergraduate Scholars program
gave me the opportunity to do the research
that actually confirmed my passion to study human disease and the immune system.
At the beginning I wasn't sure what to expect coming in
because I knew so many different departments and disciplines were going to be involved.
It's fun to have biology, human phys (physiology), and chemistry all kind of come together.
but it's really cool to hear about other undergrads are doing
and then develop those interdisciplinary connections within the group.
It's really weird to think about my undergraduate experience, if I hadn't had it...
I probably wouldn't be director of the Knight Campus
right now.
Right?
Because I probably would've gone to med school and I wouldn't be here for sure.
So I mean you guys have heard how my undergraduate experience
kind of affected my career path
and was really a motivation for forming this program.
I'd be really interested to hear
now that you guys have been in the
program for a while.
How has it changed your thinking in terms of what you think you might do next?
Seeing things fail and seeing papers get published
and all those different aspects coming together and realizing that
I wanted to be a part of that new creation of knowledge and that's really where my career was going
and hopefully you know leading to a thesis but hopefully publication and all that too
and really starting my career trajectory that way
because I had this opportunity to be here as an undergraduate.
It's great that you saw that
it's really one of the things that drew me to research was the opportunity to be creative.
At the Knight Campus you see this
combination of programs for
undergraduates and graduates and postdocs
all coming together to perform this research
because of that you're really going to see this creation of new knowledge
and this blossoming of all of these different fields.
At the end of the day this program has given me
the skills and the passion to continue studying immunology
and then someday be able to bring that knowledge to those who need it the most.
