(music playing) Isaac Song: My name is Isaac Song.
I’m a senior and majoring in molecular biology and biochemistry and the name of my research
project is investigating the mechanism of action of the caspase ced-3 in neuronal regeneration
and the C-elegans model.
My research has to do with caspases, and caspases are essentially proteins that work in apoptosis,
so when it’s time for a cell to die, they go through this caspase pathway where they
induce apoptosis.
So without caspases you can’t induce apoptosis in a worm.
So a few years ago my lab discovered that caspases are actually necessary to promote
neuronal regeneration which is very strange and interesting because we know that caspases
are used for apoptosis and it’s well established and everyone in the literature knows that
caspases are used in apoptosis but it’s not really well known what their function
is for neuronal regeneration so a lot of my work the past two, three years has been looking
into why that’s the case.
My lab has hypothesized a working model of a pathway that the caspase ced-3 might be
working through to promote neuronal regeneration, so for the past three years I’ve been gathering
evidence and data to suggest that Ced-3 is working through this pathway and as of today
the evidence does seem to suggest that, so that’s pretty exciting.
This research is important because the pathway that we’re studying, all the proteins in
that pathway are well conserved and have a human homologues, so by studying neuronal
regeneration in this pathway and understanding how neuronal regeneration works in worms,
that gives us insight into how neuronal regeneration might be working in humans as well.
Whenever neuronal injury occurs in humans, so things like spinal cord injury or traumatic
brain injury, stroke, or anything like that that results in neural injury, neurons of
the human central nervous system don’t regenerate well after those injuries and there aren’t
really a lot of therapies to address those injuries so we help by looking into or investigating
how neuronal regeneration is occurring in worms, that can give us more information about
how that might be occurring in humans as well.
I first got involved in the Aresty Research Lab where I worked as a peer instructor and
the program I took part in was the Aresty Summer Science program and that was a really
great program because for ten weeks over the summer I was working full time in the lab
and when you work full time in the lab where you get to learn all the little nuances and
the intricacies of being a scientist full time so that was a really good base for me
to build on my sophomore, junior and senior year.
My advisor is Dr. Driscoll and I met her through the Aresty Summer Science program and she
has been an amazing mentor.
I really have no words to express how grateful I am for her.
Coming in, I had no research experience and I had no idea what that whole process entailed
so working in the lab has helped me learn as to the day to day life of being a scientist,
you know, how do you design experiments, how do you interpret data?
How do you be really patient and accept failure after failure after failure?
It’s really exciting but it’s really hard at the same time and there are a lot of roadblocks,
or obstacles and as soon as you hit those roadblocks, a lot of times more often than
not a lot of undergrads get frustrated or discouraged, and then quit the lab, which
I think is a real shame, so I think that you get as much out of it as you put in so putting
in that effort I think is really important and then waiting and seeing what comes of
it will be really rewarding in the end.
While a lot of the research opportunities at Rutgers are in STEM, there are so many
other research opportunities just because Rutgers is so big, there are research projects
in like philosophy, english, education, business, and the list goes on, so there’s really
a project for everybody, it’s not just like you know the hard sciences.
You can kind of search through your department for research opportunities on your own or
you can do an independent project for a professor you might have had a class with, so there
are so many different ways you can get involved with research and I think every undergrad
should.
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