"I've George Kannarkat.
I'm a MD-PhD student at Emory University.
I'm in my fourth year of the program here and I work on looking at immune risk factors
for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area.
I went out to Baylor University for undergrad and then I came here right after that.
I've been in Atlanta for about six years now.
I'm a scientist because I think I had a lot of influences from close family members; my
uncles and my aunts who are physicians and some of them are very intellectually curious
and they would always encourage me to ask questions about things that are going on in
the world around me.
I think that just promoted me to always ask, why can't we do things better or why can't
we do things differently.
Also, just having good mentors in school.
Having good teachers that told me to always ask questions and think about better ways
of doing things, always inspiring me to do better and to do things in a new and different
way.
I can think of a couple of high school teachers that definitely pushed me forward especially
when I showed some interest in science and doing research and definitely pushed me to
go to the next level and got me the right contacts to do that and get me to where I
am today.
I've been back to my high school several times to visit some of these teachers.
One of the teachers actually works in a different school right now and one of the teachers is
still there.
Fortuitously, or unfortunately, she actually had developed Parkinson's disease.
It was really cool to go back and talk to her, when I found out that she was diagnosed
with Parkinson's and show her, â€˜That's what I'm working on.'
It was a very fulfilling moment for me to show her, â€˜Look, you inspired me to
do this and this is what I'm doing.
I'm actually working on the disease that you have.'
A lot of the work that I do involves fluorocytometry.
That's pretty cool because we can actually look at a bunch of different properties of
individual cells.
We can look at thousands of cells at the same time through this machine.
At the end, the data comes up looking like colored dots and colored clouds and we use
that to differentiate the different properties of these cells.
We also have microscopes in the lab where we can look at cells under the microscope.
That can be cool because you get to see the cells glow under the microscope.
Actually, that was one of the first things I ever did in the lab was to look at glowing
cells under the microscope.
That was when I think the bug really bit; I was like, this is really cool.
We grew these cells, we stained them to look at them under the microscope and then we saw
them.
I took pictures of them.
It's pretty cool.
We have a room where we work with cells and grow our cells and also work with the tissue
that we have as well.
Lab can be very frustrating at times and also very exciting.
You get really close to those people that you work with because they're talking through
the experiments that fail or when you have an exciting finding and you want to run and
tell your friends they're right there and you can tell this, â€˜Look.
this experiment worked and this is a cool finding.'
If I were to encourage young people to go into medical research, I would say it's a
very exciting field.
It's always changing; there are always new things to learn.
If you think about 20, 30 years ago where we were in medicine and science, we've come
really far; we can treat a lot more diseases.
We're doing cool things, not me personally, but in clinic injecting stem cells into people
to treat neurodegenerative disease.
We have new drugs that can eradicate different kinds of cancers.
We didn't have all of that 20, 30 years ago.
If you want to make an impact on large groups of people, on people's daily lives, I think
it's a really important field to go into.
It's a long process but step by step you gain all the tools you need to do it.
There are great mentors in the field and people are really passionate about what they do in
science.
It's a great field to be in."