"My name is Alicia Michael and I am a fourth year graduate student in the lab of Doctor
Carrie Partch. Our entire lab studies circadian rhythms so basically your biological clock.
So each of our cells actually have this 24 hour molecular clock that keeps time and controls
many physiological processes and is coordinated to the solar day. Many of us have felt the
pains of jet lag. This happens because those molecular clocks in your individual tissues
are out of sync with the destination time and misaligned with the environment. We found
a novel human gene that is silenced in healthy cells but turned on in many forms of cancer.
So understanding how disruption of circadian rhythms can give rise to or exacerbate cancer
will establish a molecular link between the two with the ultimate goal of identifying
cancer therapeutics.
So I'm originally from Washington State, the Pacific Northwest. And I went to, I've always
been kind of interested in science and my mom is a nurse practitioner. So she's definitely
had science in her background but not professor or scientist in quotations. And my dad is
not either. He does heating and air conditioning stuff, so.
I'm doing more biochemistry so putting, having bacteria make these proteins for me and not
just the kinds of proteins that you eat. Proteins are actually like these work horses in a cell
that do stuff like all the stuff basically. And so making the proteins in e coli bacteria
and then taking them out of e coli and purifying them just so I have that pure protein and
then seeing how that protein like interacts with another one and using more like I was
saying, atomic resolution techniques such as potentially nuclear magnetic resonance
so NMR to look at protein, protein interactions. So it uses this crazy big magnet that spins
and you can get a footprint or a fingerprint basically of a protein and then see how if
you add another protein to that that you think they interact, where it interacts. So this
is always kind of pushing my boundaries which I really like. And also you have so much freedom
as a scientist or a graduate student or a professor or whatever you choose to do because
you have these tools, you have this tool kit and you can ask any question you want. And,
basically, you have the tools to figure it out. and it gives you so much intellectual
freedom, which I think is exciting, to design an experiment, execute it, and get a result.
You're just understanding how life works and you have the ability to do that."