University of Colorado, Webb-Waring Center, Aurora, CO
This summer, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do biomedical research at the Webb-Waring Center in Aurora, Colorado. The Webb-Waring Center is a research center on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus that was founded in the early 1900s to research tuberculosis. Now, the center focuses on studying disease management and educating young scientists. My program within the Webb-Waring Center was the Colorado Undergraduate Summer Research Program, or CUSP. The program placed around thirty students in different labs throughout medical campus. Because I had previously done research in Infectious Disease, I was placed in Dr. Edward Janoff’s lab. Dr. Janoff’s current research looks at Streptococcus pneumoniae, the bacteria that causes pneumonia. For the most part, healthy adults don’t have issues fighting S. pneumoniae off. However, infections in younger children and older adults can be fatal. Dr. Janoff’s lab explores the mechanism behind pneumonia infections in hopes of finding a vaccine that can protect those at risk for it. For pneumonia to progress in humans, it must first bind to your lung cells. My project for the summer was to find a way to prevent S. pneumoniae from binding to lung cells. I hoped to do this by using an antibody that targeted an antibody-cleaving protein on the bacteria. The bacteria uses this protein to evade detection by the immune system. Therefore, if I were able to neutralize the protein, then that would hopefully reduce the bacteria’s binding to the lung cells and uncover a potential mechanism that a vaccine could exploit.
After about 10 weeks of attempting to standardize the experiment, I wasn’t able to collect meaningful data. Since the lab had never attempted an experiment like the one I was doing, we had to come up with our own protocol. The hardest part of this was finding out what doses of bacteria and what doses of antibody would be used for all our experiments. While this seems simple, standardizing an experiment can take months. So even though I did not collect much data, I was still able to create a poster to present my findings at the end of the program. I used data that the lab had previously collected to supplement some of the data that I’d gotten myself.
While I learned a lot doing lab work, CUSP also included opportunities to learn about working in healthcare. Every morning before going to lab, all of the students of CUSP came together to either attend a lecture by a faculty of the medical school, tour one of the hospitals on campus, or do medical case studies. The lectures were fascinating, and I was really interested by a lecture about endocrinology, a field that I barely knew much about before coming to Denver. One place we toured on campus was the emergency room department. We spoke with an ER doctor and got a glimpse of what life is like working in the ER. The medical case studies that we did were also very informative. We learned about what to look for in blood tests and how to produce medical signatures, which is simply a one sentence summary of the patient and their chief complaint. I was drawn to just how much of medicine is problem solving and creating an argument using evidence. It reminded me of a tutorial I took with Professor Banta last semester on infectious diseases. Much like writing, treating a patient is about gathering all the evidence you can collect through thorough examinations and tests and then coming up with a diagnosis. Learning about what doctors do on a regular basis and the everyday thinking behind being one cemented my desire to eventually pursue an MD in medical school.
Being part of CUSP also meant being part of a program called CLIMB, a program that brings together college students from different universities like Middlebury and Yale to do internships in a variety of fields in Denver. CLIMB provided housing as well, and the program made sure that I lived with people who worked in different jobs. I ended up living with students from Middlebury and Wesleyan. Being able to live with other college students from similar colleges made living in a new city less daunting, and I am endlessly thankful for the friends that CLIMB helped me make. CLIMB also ran many events throughout the summer, including providing free dinners every Wednesday, taking us to a Rockies game, and even going on a one night camping trip to go whitewater rafting.
I made sure to take advantage of the outdoor activities that Colorado offered. I hiked up my first 14er, Mount Bierstadt. (A 14er is a mountain that is above 14,000 feet in elevation.) Since I did it in early June, the mountain was covered with snow, making the hike one of the hardest and strenuous things I’d ever done. I explored Denver and Boulder and sampled some of the diverse cuisines that both places had to offer. A highlight of the summer was when, a few friends and I went camping in Moab, Utah, where we explored immense parks like Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park.
My summer in Denver was everything I could have hoped for. I met new friends and grew to love a new city. I also learned a lot about working in healthcare and reaffirmed my decision to pursue that career path. I would like to thank the generosity of Brian and Helen Fitzgerald and the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for making this formative and memorable summer possible.