Brief introduction about me to anyone reading this: I’m a rising senior in biomedical engineering here at U-M, and I work in Lonnie Shea’s lab (with postdoc Russell Urie) using polycaprolactone (PCL) scaffolds to monitor phenotypic changes in immune cell populations throughout the different gestational phases in pregnancy. I’m also working on developing a library of similar scaffolds made with different polymers for NK and fetal cell enrichment, and developing an unhealthy murine pregnancy model to characterize gene signatures and immune cell profiles during miscarriage. Outside of lab, especially in the summer, I’m a big fan of doing anything active outside, so you can find me around campus playing pickup volleyball, soccer, basketball, and tennis or enjoying the nice paths and docks on the Huron river.
This summer, I hope to contribute to getting our first manuscript based on previous experimentation ready for publication, and begin to assemble figures/data for a second manuscript relating to newer work involving new scaffolds and an unhealthy pregnancy model. I expect to encounter many challenges throughout the data collection and analysis phases of our work. Experiments often do not go exactly as we’d like them to, but one thing I aim to get really good at this summer is working around these challenges and obtaining useful information from so-so experiments as well as working through the process of experimental redesign. I have worked with the same mentor for about 9 months now, so I have familiarity with the project and the skills required to push it forward.