My name is Rebecca Dutta and we are at the de la Zerta Lab at Stanford University in
the Structural Development Department and I am a research assistant here.
So I just grew up across the Bay here in Freemont, so I'm from around here.
I've always really loved to read, I read sort of voraciously as a kid, to the extent that
I would hide books in my bathroom to read them while I was in the bathroom.
Apart from that I loved hiking and I still do.
We have this huge poster to just learn everything, knowing that you will never know everything
and I think that's what motivates me the most, just knowing that I won't always know the
answer to everything.
I work with our imaging technique which is OCT.
My own project that I'm starting off right now is looking at circulating tumor cells,
trying to look at a tumor that is growing inside the body and you can't really see it
unless you literally excise it out.
We use this technology because we can use it in a living, breathing patient without
having to do any kind of surgical intervention and we can still see the tumor for example.
I'm using free styling beads as a mock up for a circulating tumor cell and to that I'll
conjugate a golden andiron (???) and then I'll image it using our Telesto, which is
our imaging system.
It's these little things that you see that are actually blinking, those are actually
poly styling beads and you can take several different scans.
I mean theoretically you can think that if you have something that can target a tumor
cell very specifically, it can even conjugate a drug molecule to it and have it specifically
target a tumor cell and destroy that tumor cell without destroying anything else in the
body so, I mean that's very far down the line but you can imagine that using this kind of
technology and this kind of like specificity you could get to that point.
You know once you start working in a lab, it's just so much fun to be able to learn
new things from different kinds of people and see things through different lens.
That's always been a fascinating experience for me and really one of my motivators for
going into science.
Feeling like you know exactly what you want to do is probably not a good thing.
Just explore different avenues.
Computation is a huge part of the sciences and that was always sort of a scary aspect
because I felt like I was fine at math but I didn't likeâ€¦it wasn't my favorite
subject or anything.
But getting over that was really fun actually.
I went to college down south, in Southern California at a Liberal Arts College for Women
called Scripps College.
I took classes that were co-ed, but it was really interesting, just the amount of passion
and enthusiasm there was for science, especially the female members in my class.
It was very empowering for me, you never felt like you were behind any other gender or anything
like that, you always felt at the forefront.
I think there is a misconception that fields in stem are more mathematically based are
no place for a women to be in and I think that is just a huge misconception there and
I see it among my female friends.
I think that's the reason why there are more females in biology related fields in stem
rather than in more engineering or computer science based fields.
That's a little sad to me.
I think a lot of the problem solving happens at the intersection of those two different
fields.
Speaker 2: (video showing classroom) Okay this was the percentage of women in the professional
fieldsâ€¦physics, math fields and medical science fields.
The computer science is the red line.
Speaker 1: I would really encourage you know any girl out there who is thinking about it
and maybe is a little bit terrified of what, you know, a computational future might look
like, to really pursue it.
In general when I, you know just open the news or hear about someone that's been suffering
from like let's say cancer, it is a motivator.
I don't even need someone close in my lifeâ€¦it's just all over the place it's so prevalent,
itsâ€¦forever a scary thing you know and what keeps me in research all the time is
the opportunity to make a difference from a very basic level, like from the technique
level from the pharma logical level that I think is just as important as being in contact
with the patient.
And so that's what really keeps me in science and what keeps me excited about what I do
every single day.