Hi. My name is Miranda Lee. I go by Lee generally, though. And I'm a senior biochemistry major. This summer I worked out at Sbarro Health Research Organization. It's located at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. It's a nonprofit committed to researching the genetics of disease. It was founded by an Italian scientist named Antonio Giordano, with money from the CEO of Sbarro. Hence the name, like a pizza company. Yes. [INAUDIBLE] And this is the building where I worked. That's just a picture of Temple University's campus. 

So I got this internship by just emailing Dr. Giardano, who is this guy right here in the middle, because I didn't have any connections and I wasn't really finding anything that I wanted through LyonNet. So I knew that I wanted to be in Philadelphia for the summer, because I'm from the area. So I just looked at research that was being done at different campuses in Philly. I chose to email Dr. Giardano, because I was really interested in the mission statement of the SHRO. We talked about how they're a non-profit, so they operate outside of government funding and outside of academic brand funding, and just receive private funding. And every dollar goes straight to the research. 

And they also stated that they have a commitment to training young, new scientists, which I guess is where I came in. And so I thought that, yeah, they would let me come work for them. And so I emailed Dr. Giardano. He got back to me pretty quickly. He interviewed me on the phone and offered me a position. At the time, I was considering a couple other offers, a couple other positions, but I had a really good feeling about him based on my conversation with him. And I really thought that the people there would be great. So I went to work with them, and I was proven right. 

Dr. Marcella Macaluso is this one. She's the one that I worked with most closely day to day along with her PhD student, Carlo. And in case you can't tell from their names, they were all Italian, every single one of them. So that was kind of difficult sometimes, but I learned a lot about Italy. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So I'm not going to go into detail about the research, really, but I wanted to give you at least a general overview of what the organization does and what I did. So Dr. Giardano is known for discovering this tumor suppressor for the gene called p130. It does a lot of different things in the body, but basically, it controls different protein levels in different kinds of cells. So a lot of the research that the SHRO does centers around this p130, because, I mean, it's his protein. 

So Dr. Macaluso's research focuses on the role that P130 has in breast cancer and eye disease. Both of them are linked to weird levels of P130, and both are also linked to hormone [INAUDIBLE]. That might seem kind of weird at first. Like, it would make sense that estrogen is involved in breast cancer, but I think it's also really implicated in eye disease and it has a lot more roles in the body than you may actually realize. It's not just involved in puberty and menopause, which is what I originally thought. 

So the project that I worked on-- wanting to know how these two proteins-- the names really aren't important-- but how these two proteins that were also implicated in eye disease, how they're connected to p130. And also, given the fact that hormone imbalances are linked to these different disease, we wanted to know how the hormone levels impacted the expression of those two specific proteins. OK. 

So what did I do? Again, I'm not going to really talk about this technical stuff, but it's there if you're curious. A large part of the project and a large part of my job was just cell culturing. I had to make sure that we constantly had supplies of retinal and corneal cells in order to do experiments on. So what I did with that was I would be able to split them to grow them in new Petri dishes, add hormone treatments like progesterone and the estrogen that we were studying. Oh, and I had to change the medium every 48 hours. And checking on them was the first thing that I did every day when I came into lab. I would have to go there and make sure that they weren't infected, which [INAUDIBLE] yellow. And that's actually not my picture, but that's exactly what the cells I worked with looked like. And make sure that they were growing just under the microscope. 

And I though this was really cool, because I got to work with primary cells, which are non-genetically modified cells taken directly from living tissue, whereas-- I mean, we don't work with human cells at all in labs at school. At least not as far as I've experienced. And definitely not primary cells, which-- I thought it was really cool. So I was really glad to have learned that skill. 

So I would do all this work to keep these cells alive. And then we would kill them, and take the proteins out, and separate the proteins, and look for the ones that we were interested in. This whole experiment is called a Western blot. The result would look something like that bottom picture. And you may have seen that before in your classes. But we can analyze it qualitatively and just kind of say, this band's darker than this band, so there's more protein there. Or quantitatively to put numbers in just how dark it is, using a computer program. And this is not the cleanest gel in the world. It's just the one that I happened to have on my phone from the summer. But this is an example of what we would get. 

So what we found out is that estrogen does increase the levels of those two proteins that we were interested in and that p130 regulates both of them at a transcriptional level. I should have said there were also other experiments that we did that focused more on the protein-protein interactions, but I kind of observed those and participated at a minimal level. And the Western blotting and the protein cultures were my main job. But those other experiments kind of showed also how p130 operates at, like, a whole other level. 

So this experience really increased my confidence in my technical lab skills and my problem-solving ability. I ran, basically, like a Western blot in a day, so it was a lot of protein extraction and a lot of gels that I was running. And so I got really good at it whereas in labs in classes, we kind of learn it once, learn it twice, and then don't really delve into it. But doing the same thing all summer meant that I really understood the theory behind every single thing that we did. And this meant that whenever something went wrong, I actually knew how to fix it, which was a really great feeling. If my proteins wouldn't separate in the gel, I would just change the concentration of the agars. If my cells got infected in those Petri dishes, I could just regrow them. 

And a lot of the techniques that I learned over the summer are applicable to the research that I'm doing now for my independent study for my thesis. So I worked with Professor Jason Andras. Many of you know him. And we are researching ant genetics. And these are our little ant colonies. And this is the very first PCR/gel that I ran in here. And it actually worked, and I was really proud. 

Woo! 

And it was really nice to know that I already had the skills to do this, so I could jump right into the research without having to learn all these basic skills. 

As far as for the future future, I personally really liked academia. I'm a bit of an introvert, so I really like being able to do my own work and just have people that I can reach out to and ask for help when I need it. So I do want to get my PhD eventually, just not right away. The other thing that I learned, though, is that the environment that you're in makes a really big difference. The people that I worked with were so supportive of me and so friendly. And they'd always make sure I had what I needed. So overall, I was really, really glad that I went with my gut feeling and chose to work with the SHRO this summer. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE]