Medical & Molecular Sciences

Ph.D. student

"My dad has a window for his plants in the house. I've never watered them in my entire life. Never. As a kid, never touched them. Fast forward to today, I'm really a plant mom. I believe the first plants I ever took care of were put in the lab by Dr. B [Esther Biswas-Fiss]. I guess she saw how well I was doing with them and now it's like, 'Oh, this one's dying. Can you bring it back to life?' I’ve even reached the point where I’ve taken in some office plants from the department.

Some of the offices [in Willard Hall] don't have windows, so when the plants move to our lab  they get a lot of sun. It's really humid and that makes a good place for them. It looks like a jungle in there. My specialty is the orchids. And I'm not doing a lot to them. I'm just watering them. Sometimes I put some fertilizer in there, change the soil. And I made it to the next level: I downloaded one of those apps, like you can diagnose them.

I guess the whole plant mom thing reminds me that we all go through different phases of our lives whether that be in our personal lives or our careers. I remember what first got me really interested in biotech. I took a bioethics course in high school and we were talking about taboo topics in biotechnology like the right to live, personalized medicine, stem cell research. And my teacher was a rock star, Miss Ellis was her name. She was like, ‘Yeah, when I die, I want my body to be frozen.’ She was really cool, so that's what got me into science.

I completed my biotech bachelor's and my biotech master's at Thomas Jefferson University, and Dr. B was my program coordinator at the time. She had just gotten this offer from UD to be the [Medical and Molecular Sciences] program chair and she invited all her lab at the time to come here with her, so that's how I came to UD in 2016. I started as a research assistant here, then I was the lab manager, and now I’m a Ph.D. student.

My research area is in inherited retinal diseases that eventually lead to blindness. My lab focuses on ABCA4 - this is a protein in the retina and it's responsible for getting rid of waste. When it doesn't function properly, that leads to a lot of waste in your retina and that can lead to photoreceptor death, so this is what is causing patients to progressively go blind. 

There are a lot of mutations on the protein, so I have been focusing on the ECD2 domain and those mutations in there to see how they're impacting the function of ABCA4, just to get a better understanding of how they're impacting the patient and the actual disease. 

We've been looking at more testimonials and trying to really immerse ourselves in the patient perspectives. Sometimes you forget what's happening to the people that are actually experiencing it. There is a retinal disease that normally affects people that are 50+. It really makes living a lot harder - things we're so used to doing, like reading recipes or reading labels, or, one person, her grandchild was born recently and she doesn't even know what they look like.

Your research topic kind of finds you. Dr. B gave me my first chance to work in a lab and to get into research and do my own experiments. It's such an interesting topic and it's such a vast thing, especially with these variants. There's not a lot of information on it, so there's plenty of work to do, and that's what keeps me interested in it."