Hi! My name is Liz Lombard. I am a rising senior majoring in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in earth science. I am a fellow in the Shea Lab with my mentor Dr. Russell Urie. My summer project is using a PCL scaffold in pregnant mice to monitor their immune cells in order to study the immune response during an unhealthy pregnancy (miscarriage). I have worked with Russ for a year now and developed my confidence in animal work as well as cell work. Since I have spent a lot of time working on this project already, I am able to really go deeper with my work this summer with all of my time devoted to the project instead of split between two jobs. Being able to have research experience in the summer makes it much more enjoyable because I am able to spend more than just a couple hours here a day and really do important and difficult work. It makes the research experience all that more interesting and fun! I started the program a bit earlier so I have already been working for a few weeks and am getting into some tedious and detailed work as I have spent the past weeks setting up and researching the experiment. I am lucky enough to get to work with Lauren Hesse in the same lab with Dr. Urie so it’s awesome to have a friend also doing the Women and Gender Studies Fellowship Program with me! We get to do weekly journal meetings and discussion as well as work on projects together.
