My name is Stacy Webb. This is the Dutch lab and I’m a graduate research assistant.
I grew up in Dayton, Ohio. There are no scientists in the family. I’m actually a first generation
college student. I had a high school teacher who really fostered science. She was a physics
teacher. And then when I got into college, finding the science classes most interesting
kind of led me to a career in science. I went to college in western Kentucky – Kentucky
Wesleyan College – and I got my degree in chemistry and now I’m studying biochemistry
to get my Ph.D. I started to do a research project at Kentucky Wesleyan and the thing
that really caught me was that when I was doing that research project, there was a moment
where I realized I was the first person to see something and that was really exciting,
and I loved that feeling and I wanted to kind of pursue that further. We have a great lab.
It’s fun. We are kind of goofy sometimes. We like to joke around and kind of tease each
other, but we definitely work very well as a team. When somebody needs something, others
always pitch in. We’re always kind of looking out for each other. We have very distinct
projects, but we’re definitely very aware of what the others are doing. So a day-to-day,
typically I’ll come in and first thing I always check my e-mails to see if there’s
anything I need to respond to, and then I’ll get experiments started – typically something
with cell culture – and kind of go through that through the day. And then, usually I
wind up my day by updating my lab notebook and just kind of making sure I remember everything
I did that day. In our lab we study respiratory viruses. We study a family that includes measles,
mumps – those very important pathogens – and the virus that I specifically study is called
the Hendra virus. It’s a very dangerous virus. It infects humans and animals, and
what I’m specially looking at is some of the entry mechanisms of that virus. There
are these proteins that cover the surface of the virus and we want to see how those
contribute to viral entry getting into cells. So how does a virus attach to a human cell,
enter, and then do all the awful things that cause us to be sick? The Hendra virus isn’t
a virus that’s widely studied, and so what I’m doing is very novel. The surface proteins
that I study, I’m looking at a very hydrophobic part of the protein, which is something most
people don’t do. And so, it’s exciting to kind of be doing something different and
it also makes it difficult, but it’s led to some very interesting new avenues. The
future would be viral therapeutics. We want to look at how we can develop therapeutics
more broadly. So the idea that maybe what we’re looking at now can be applied beyond
just this one specific virus, and that maybe it could be applied to a family. And so, that
would be amazing for world health. It’s a very big picture, but it would be a very
big step. You get an idea in your mind and you go through an experiment and in your head
it makes perfect sense, but then you have to get it to some point where you need to
present it to an audience that maybe doesn’t think the same way you do or have the same
background, but you want to convey an idea that is important to you and is going to be
important to them. So that’s definitely the most challenging part for me. When I did
my interviews, I was sort of in this region and it just felt right when I was here doing
the interviews. Ultimately, I ended up loving Becky Dutch. She’s an amazing mentor to
have and so that’s why I ended up finding myself here. UK is an amazing place to do science.
There’s a great environment here. The researchers are very open to communication.
They’re very open to share. It’s been a very nurturing environment. There’s not
this terrible sense of intense competitiveness. It’s a very family environment and it’s
been great so far. Science matters because it’s what’s going to keep moving us forward
as a species. We have to keep learning about how to stay healthy, how to fight these microorganisms
like viruses. It’s what’s going to keep us on top. So I think it’s very important to study science.