My name is Kimberly Insigne and we're at University of California Los Angeles in Dr. Kosuri's
lab and I'm a first year mathematics graduate student.
I'm one of the few people who does bioinformatics which essential means a fancy way to say a
mix and biology and computer science.
So if you think about the way humans work you kind of think of it as a genetic code.
How there's a code that describes how our body works, how it regulates itself but a
lot of the times we don't know how all of that works together so what I do is I bring
computer science into the mix.
That's what my field is all about.
It's using computer science to try and understand the genetic code.
What I'm doing in Dr. Kosuri's lab the project we're going to be starting is taking an idea
of understand the genetic code but taking to a more simple level of understanding how
it works in bacteria.
It's a huge field in synthetic biology.
We use e coli to make a lot of stuff.
We make for example insulin in mainly e coli so the idea is if you understand how something
works really well you can make things more efficiently, to fine tune them.
So that's what my project is in this lab.
It's working on understanding how genes work and e coli.
I grew up technically Temecula, California which is about an hour North of San Diego.
It's known for its vineyards and everything.
So I grew up in Southern California and I went to school at UCSD and came here for UCLA
so I was born and raised in Southern California, probably never going to leave.
I've always kind of been medically inclined I guess, since I was young.
My dad's a doctor in the Navy and my mom works in a health sciences company.
I'm a scientist because coming into undergrad I thought I wanted to be a doctor because
I want to obviously help out people but the more and more I thought about it the more
I realized that that's not where I wanted to focus in my efforts.
I of course want to help out people but I think where the most important lies is the
research.
Being able to solve a problem not just for one person but for everyone and I think that's
really important.
Like people need to be working in science because I don't think people understand that.
People think science is all about going in.
It's all been one big problem and then you're done but it's not what it's about.
It's about going in and solving a very small problem that will probably take you a long
time but it's so worth it just knowing that you contributed to that body of knowledge
and that, the things you're doing or helping everyone, human kind in general, not just
one person at a time.
My mission in the lab is to understand how genes are regulated in e coli so the way I
do that it's kind of unique aspect which I really love is that I'm equally good at experiments
or wet lab work but I'm also really good at programming so a lot the things I can do is
if I want to say test a hypothesis in e coli, say I want to change slightly how a gene works
and see how it does or from a computer programming perspective I can write all the code necessary
to make all the changes that I want and then hop on over to the bench and test everything
out.
So for me it's really fun being able to go back and forth between the two things.
It's so much fun every day coming in.
I come in and usually the first couple is just catching up with everyone and as everyone
is just going in and out of the lab I'm talking to people, I'm constantly asking people questions.
I go to seminars during the day and I see a lot of other people in the field that I
talked to and I would definitely say I'm not alone in the lab.
The hopes and dreams of my research are that we can understand our own DNA, how we work
so well that we can kind of take control of it.
I see it as having your DNA looked at when you go to the doctor is routine.
You go in when you're young, you see your DNA, you have this amount of risk for getting
Alzheimer's or being obese, for having diabetes and being able to kind of track that throughout
your life and being able to have more personalized preventative medicine and that's what I really
hope for and that's why I do what I do because I think we can get to that place where we
can understand ourselves so well.
We can kind of control our health at a level that we can't even imagine right now.
I would say to anyone thinking about this career that I feel like anybody could do it.
There's so many different areas in science.
If you think you're really good at math you can be more biostatistics.
If you don't there'es so many different fields and I fee like there's a track to very many
different personalities.
People who are independent, people who want to collaborate a lot, people who and especially
for those who want to have control over what they do with their career, because a lot of
science in being able to ask those big questions and being, and having the resources to do
it and having the support to do it.
So it's really a really open ended field.
It's kind of if you can think it you can do it in science and that's not even a cliche.
It's very true so I would feel like compared to any other careers, maybe lawyers, doctors,
there's one path, there's one way but in science there's, you could pretty much do whatever
you want.