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]