My name is Katherine Shepard.
We are at Drexel University in Philadelphia in the Akins lab.
I am a research technician.
I help make sure that the lap is running smoothly on a day to day basis.
I have some projects of my own but I also help maintain everyone else's experiments
as well.
So, right now, I'm working on a project looking at gene expression in the olfactory system.
So we have tissue from different parts of the olfactory system and we're looking for
the relative abundance of genes that are expressed in those different tissues.
I am from Rockland County in New York.
I am a scientist because growing up, I was always really interested in science.
It was always one of my favorite subjects in school.
And when I took biology in high school, I just kind of fell in love with it and decided
that was what I wanted.
I didn't really know what it meant to be a scientist but I knew that was the stuff that
I loved to learn about.
I wouldn't say I had a driving personal motivation like to get in to science but I was interested
in Dr. Akins lab initially because I had a personal interest in autism through members
of my family.
And, even though, we don't really directly study autism clinically pur-say, it was something
that first like caught my interest to get in to this lab.
Some new things we're working on are trying to refine some tissue clearing techniques.
So, making, particularly brain tissue transparent so that we can do deep tissue imaging on a
confocal microscope and be able to image an intact brain would be really interesting for
us.
So, on a typical day in the lab everybody has their own projects that they're working
on at the bench but we're also extremely collaborative, everybody is working with everybody else.
Asking each other questions, trying to use everybody's knowledge to answer our own specific
questions.
I'm hoping that our research will eventually answer questions about neuroscience that we
still don't know that much about.
And, also kind of add to the knowledge about disease ? syndrome which is such a common
genetic disease that affects so many people.
So anything that can help us further understand what's going on in the brains of these individuals
and how we can possibly apply that to treatments would be really important.
I think that if you're interested in science and asking new questions and learning things
that nobody's really been able to answer before, going in to research is really fulfilling.
Gives you the opportunity to really use your mind every day and do different things every
day and answer these really important questions.
It's just fun, like if you like science you get to do science.