Melissa, M E L I S S A, Kemp, K E M P. We're on the Georgia Tech campus, we're on the biotech
quad in the Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Biosciences, and what I do is I'm an Associate
Professor here in biomedical engineering. My research is really thinking about cells
in how they're hard-wired in order to perceive their environment, and we think that this
is a really important mechanism that is involved with a lot of inflammatory diseases, with
cancer.
I am from all over, I've lived in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, but usually the short
answer I give is Cleveland, Ohio, that's where I spent the most time growing up. I guess
I've always been interested in science, I, as a preschooler I was super into dinosaurs,
I mean I memorized all the dinosaur names and I had the dinosaur books, and I guess
it was a little bit unusual at the time for a little girl to be so into that, and at one
point I thought, "well hey, I'll be like an archaeologist, wouldn't that be cool?" I think
our world around us is fascinating, and I really want to understand the way it's put
together, so I love the process of discovery. Cancer does run in my family, and one thing
that has been really nice about my research is that it's applicable to cancer, specifically,
so I feel like if we can understand the way cancer cells are different in the way they
handle oxygen and respiration, that to me is a really exciting impact that I can have
on just basic cancer research itself.
One of the goals of my research is to, to really understand the way antioxidants work
in cells. We think about taking things like vitamin C, or eating your spinach, because
it's full of antioxidants, and the idea is that this is somehow helpful in preventing
disease, so one of the goals of what we're doing is building up these computational models
of how those antioxidants would actually operate on cells.
So as we're walking into the lab, what you're going to see is a bunch of different benches.
We have a room that's dedicated just for our cell culture, so we've got a microscope in
there, we have laminar flow hoods which allow us to work with our cells and not contaminate
them. And then those cells go in an incubator, which are these nice warm moist environments
where they can grow like they would be growing in our body.
One of the most fun things about my job is that I work with a lot of different scientists
and engineers, we get to share ideas and materials and equipment very easily back and forth,
so my hope is really just to contribute to the research community. I'm just hoping that
what I do helps someone else out somewhere else in the world, maybe I won't be the one
to cure cancer, but if something I publish helps that next person make that leap and
discovery, then I feel like I've done my job.