Internship Commentaries

Below are summaries from 4 current MPH students about their
internship experiences in a BMS faculty laboratory or setting. These
will give you an idea of the diversity of experiences available.

Michelle Dross
MPH, Biomedical Sciences - 2006

Internship Title: Genetic sequencing of the Tn1546 transposon in isolates of the first case of vancomycin-resistant S. aureus (VRSA) in New York State

Internship Mentor: Kim Musser, Ph.D

Summary: Ever since the development of antimicrobial drugs, the threat of bacteria developing resistance to them has been in the minds of many scientists. Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) causes many community-acquired and nosocomial infections, and became resistant to the drugs penicillin and methicillin many years ago. In 2004, the first case of vancomycin-resistant S. aureus (VRSA) occurred in New York State. This is a major public health issue because vancomycin is a powerful drug, reflecting its overuse and misuse in the health care setting. This internship, which took place in the Molecular Development lab at the David Axelrod Institute, focused on performing genetic analysis on four isolates from the New York VRSA patient, in order to better understand VRSA at the DNA level.

Samuel Imarenakhue
MPH, Biomedical Sciences - 2006

Internship Title: Genomic Array Analysis of Jurkat T Cells Undergoing Iron-Induced Oxidative Stress

Internship Mentor: Scott Tenenbaum, Ph.D

Summary: Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are inevitable by-products of respiratory metabolism and humans have evolved effective cellular mechanisms to detect and detoxify these harmful metabolites. The ability of these metabolites to cause complex diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and aging has attracted the attention of researchers who are trying to understand the role that these intermediates play in disease etiology. Oxidative stress is a physiological state in which the production of ROS overwhelms cellular defenses. In the spring and summer semesters, I was engaged in a project that used a genomic approach to study how cells respond to "insults" by ROS. In my project, iron was used as a stimulus to induce oxidative stress in immortalized leukemia cell lines called Jurkat T cells. A DNA microarray experiment was used to determine the expression profiles of genes that are upregulated and downregulated when Jukat T cells were subjected to oxidative stress. This project enabled me to gain hands-on experience on how new technologies in molecular biology are currently being used to better understand the etiology of complex diseases that challenge the field of public health.

Shishir Ojha
MPH, Epidemiology - 2005

Internship Title: Molecular mechanisms driving the reversal of malignancy of metastatic cancer cells

Internship Mentor: Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, Ph.D

Summary: For my first experience in basic science research I chose the lab of Dr. Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, in the SPH Cancer Research Center. During the past few months I learned several basic and advanced techniques like tissue culture, passaging tumor cells in vivo, transformation, transfection, plasmid amplification and extraction, protein assay, western blot, flow cytometry and viral infection. The best thing about this experience is that while learning these techniques I am carrying out the experiments assigned to me that address specific questions in the project. In that way I am making some contribution to the research project. Presently, I am working on some experiments that are important for understanding how tumor cells might become dormant and resist chemotherapy. In one interesting experiment I am making three set of dormant and tumor cell lines each with normal, low or high levels of PERK, an important protein in the ER stress pathway promoting survival and dormancy of tumor cells under wide variety of stress. I will inoculate these cells in vivo and treat them with an anticancer drug and observe the difference in the response of the tumorigenic and dormant tumor cell lines with different levels of PERK activation. When I started I was interested in learning new techniques but now it is the curiosity about the actual biology we are studying, which is motivating me in my experiments. This lab is a very diverse group; we have members from high school, rotating graduate students, lab tech, doctoral student, post-docs, to a senior post-doc. Though my training in lab techniques was marginal when I joined the lab I was welcomed and never felt uncomfortable owing to the diverse population where everyone is learning from each other. Everyone in the lab accepted me with open arms and we have fun inside and outside of the lab. Questions welcomed via e-mail.

Stacy de Assis Matthews
MPH, Biomedical Sciences - 2006

Internship Title: Development of Anopheles darlingi and Anopheles marajoara in Macapá, Brazil.

Internship Mentor: Jan E. Conn, Ph.D

Summary: Anopheles darlingi and Anopheles marajoara are two of the major regional malaria vectors in Amazonian Brazil. In order to further characterize their development in both a laboratory and a field setting, mosquitoes were raised in special traps at two field sites in Lagoa dos Indios and Granja Alves, two peri-urban localities outside the city of Macapá, Amapá state, eastern Amazonian Brazil, and in the insectary at the Instituto de Pesquisas Científicas e Tecnológicas do Estado do Amapá (IEPA), Macapá, Brazil. With the help of researchers from the Instituto Evandro Chagas in Belém, Brazil, we caught mosquitoes at night, collected the eggs that were laid, and observed their development from larvae to adults. The time of development from eggs to larvae to adults was recorded, as well as water temperatures in the insectary and in the field. With this research, I faced many exciting and unexpected challenges, including catching the wrong types of mosquitoes, slow-growing larvae, and encounters with fruit-loving spider monkeys. Working in Brazil was amazing, not only because of the tropical surroundings, but also because of my wonderful colleagues there who helped me to overcome challenging situations, introduced me to Brazilian culture, and allowed me to get the most out of my research experience.