Experiences

The National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR)

I had the wonderful opportunity of attending NCUR this month held in Long Beach, California. It was an opportunity that was made possible through this LHSI internship and my participation in the Kimble-Hill Laboratory.

At this conference, I did a poster presentation on my work "Understanding the Role of Phosphatidylinositol-driven lipid phases in Triple Negative Breast Cancer Aggressiveness." It was an hour-long presentation where I spoke with many professionals and undergraduate students about my research. One of the biggest things I learnt through this process of doing my research and presenting is to always say what you know and what you do not know as well as explain how your work is relevant to persons. I also noted that understanding your audience is key to a good presentation.

It was truly amazing there were over 1500+ poster presentations in 2 days presented by undergraduate students from all over the country. These students were from many disciplines and that was very interesting to see as the topics were so different. I was able to attend a few posters my favorite poster being about the lack of proper healthcare resources in developing countries. This was very interesting to me as I am an international student from Jamaica which is considered a developing country and our healthcare facilities severely lack the equipment/ resources available in developed countries so it is hard to get truly beneficial care in our country. I was able to speak about my personal experiences and meet members of this research team whom I got connected with and will collaborate with in the future.

There was also a graduate school fair during this conference and in my opinion, it was the best part of the conference. I spoke with so many graduate schools, ones I knew or heard of and others completely new to me. At each table there was something new to learn and as I kept speaking with representatives the more I knew what to ask other tables. I learned key details about the application process, what makes someone a good candidate, how to go about applying, and finally what funding options were available at each school. I never knew almost all of the information that I heard at the recruitment tables and I felt that this made this experience invaluable. I left my resume and contact details with schools and so far I have received follow up emails from each of the schools and I will be following up with them also. It can be a bit overwhelming given all the schools however I had started ranking my top school interests and what they offer and so will be giving those priority and then sort through the others.

The Susan G Komen Tissue Bank

I started working at the Susan G Komen Breast Tissue Bank in March 2022. It was my freshman year at IUPUI and I wanted to start being involved on campus.

The work at the tissue bank is all about collecting normal breast tissue samples from women. We do this through many collection events where we recruit women and more recently men to donate their healthy breast tissue.

This has been one of the most valuable experiences for me here at IUPUI, I have learned so much about health and racial disparities in breast cancer and it has driven me to want to consider breast cancer research as a future career.

While at the tissue bank I have performed various roles:

Student intern where I get the opportunity to participate in Minority recruitment for minoritize populations for research purposes.
Surgical assistant student at collection events assisting surgeons who are doing breast biopsies by operating the biopsy machines, holding pressure on the breast to stop bleeding, and performing the cleaning and bandaging of the incision site.
Lab technician: I have worked in the lab to separate the components of the blood using a centrifuge, and processing the breast tissue sample for cryo-preservation.

Center for research and learning symposium (CRL)

In the summer of 2023 I was able to participate in my first undergraduate research experience through a summer DS-UROP scholarship.

My summer internship was with Dr. Salvatore Condello in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. During my internship, I studied how the upregulation of certain receptors leads to chemoresistance in ovarian cancer cells.

I decided to do an internship in ovarian cancer as I found out that persons with the BRCA mutation have an increased risk of having both breast and ovarian cancer. I already knew that I wanted to get into breast cancer research so I decided to try ovarian cancer research. Now I am positive that in the future I wish to focus on female-based cancers.

The image above shows me presenting my research at the CRL summer research symposium. There I received an honorable mention for my presentation.

The work I contributed to for that summer was also sent to be published but it is now being revised based on reviews.

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