Higher Education at the University

¶ … higher education at the University of Michigan, I found myself in the same position as the vast majority of my peers -- I didn't really know what I wanted to study, let alone what I wanted to spend the rest of my life devoted to. The many interests I held and hold certainly served to make the world an interesting place, but they also made choices of selection (and thus necessarily exclusion) quite difficult. Fortune intervened in the form of a yearlong full-time research assistant position, however, and this experience made the pursuit of science a clear preference for me. More specifically, it was during this time that I resolved to pursue a doctorate in a specific are of genetic investigation, and when it comes to helping me reach this goal I can think of no better program than the University of Michigan's PIBS.

Though I took a variety of science classes during my years as an undergraduate, it was not until my junior year that I took a position at the Lo Lab as a research assistant. The Lo Lab studies transcriptional regulation, and the project I was assigned to examined enhancer activities in development, using Drosophila as a model. Initially my duties consisted of the lowly yet necessary tasks of basic lab maintenance and fruit fly husbandry (not a very complicated or arduous process), but even with a broom in hand I was being exposed to real research for the first time in my life, and I found it incredibly fascinating. I began working with Dr. Lisa Johnson on characterizing various transgenic lines using both GFP and antibodies involving the sparkling enhancer. My other duties grew more involved, and duties included micro-dissecting imaginal eye discs from Drosophila larvae and pupae, preparing and staining the tissue, and ultimately imaging the tissue using fluorescent and confocal microscopy.

Over the course of the year, my lab competencies improved immensely and I was eventually given the opportunity to head my own personal research project. Studying a novel enhancer (sparkling) sequence that could mediate remote enhancer-promoter interaction for sparkling, I experimented to determine whether or not this sequence could mediate remote interactions between other enhancers in Drosophila. Preliminary data suggested the Mef2 enhancer would form a good experimental subject due to observed functional issues exacerbated by distance form the promoter. Creating a stable transgenic line and using whole mount RNA in situ hybridization to determine whether the RCE sequence could mediate Mef2 functionality, I was initially disappointed that my research yielded no conclusive results, especially as I was given a rare opportunity to present my undergraduate research findings to a small departmental biweekly meeting. Nonspecific staining in both the control and experimental groups rendered any possible findings virtually invisible, but ultimately the opportunity to participate in the research process from hypothesis through to data presentation was a tremendous opportunity for me, and I highly value the experience.

My taste for research had only just been awoken by my experiences in my third year as an undergraduate, and after completing my degree I signed on with the lab as a full-time research technician rather than immediately moving on to graduate school. Over the course of my employment, I became involved in the study of modifier genes related to coagulation factors, primarily using zebra fish and occasionally mice as animal models for similar (often identical) human processes. This is the research that ultimately led to my creation of a scientific abstract and a presentation made to a pediatrics symposium, providing enormous learning opportunities and research leadership experience along the way. My presentation consisted of my results in attempting to fully characterize the coagulation factors that had long been observed as conserved in zebrafish, but that remained relatively unstudied save for such surface observation. Using RNA in situ hybridization techniques on 24-, 72-, and 120-hour post-fertilization wild type (ABxTL) zebrafish and using PCR amplification with a T7, T3, or SP6 promoter site flanking the antisense primer to create DIG-labeled riboprobes 400-600 base pairs in length, then sectioning and recording images, my research showed was able to characterize almost the entire coagulation cascade, and also demonstrated that most coagulation factors (with the surprising exception of factor IX) were expressed in the same tissues as their human orthologs. Though this research ultimately imply confirmed that zebrafish were an excellent subject for studying coagulation processes that occur in human, it also opens new research possibilities at the genetic level.