"Hi.
I'm Megan Li and we're at UCSF in Diana Kroetz lab.
And I am currently a graduate student who is working on a project to study the genetics
of patients who get certain toxicities in response to a particular cancer drug.
I grew up in a pretty I guess STEM field oriented family.
My dad was an electrical engineer.
My mom was a linguistics major in college actually but she's kind of a self taught scientist
at home so growing up at home we had like tons of textbooks on science and biology so
she was a major influence, an inspiration for me and my older brother is also a bioengineer.
So I joined my first lab kind of as a volunteer at Stanford and my brother was there at the
time.
He was in, he was already in college.
But it was a narcolepsy lab at Stanford and I got in kind of as a volunteer when I was
14 or 15 and I basically kind of just followed a post doc around and learned the very basic
lab skills like how to hold a pipette, how to run a PCR, how to run a gel and so on.
So that was kind of my way in.
I feel very fortunate to have gotten that opportunity and to have the mentors that I
did who trusted me, trusted someone at my age at that time.
So I majored in biology as an undergrad.
But I've always been interested in genetics so like in the narcolepsy lab we focused on
genetics.
I was trying to find using a zebra fish, what could be a genetic cause of narcolepsy.
My research is, kind of falls into two different parts.
There's like the traditional physical bench work.
I grow different types of cells together, endothelial cells and smooth muscle cells
and I've been trying to treat them with this drug that I'm studying.
And oftentimes after the drug treatment I'll want to isolate the DNA from these cells or
isolate certain proteins form these cells and run assays on that.
And then I guess the other part is this more computationally intensive part.
I have a lot of genetic data sets with sequencing data from patients that I'm studying.
And I kind of want to analyze the genetic mutations that I might be finding in those
patients.
So it involves a lot of command line software, writing code, and statistical analyses to
figure that out.
During high school and college I never imagined that I would need to learn to write code or
anything but ten years later here I am trying to learn it as I go.
So I think that just speaks to how fast different fields of science are evolving and how different
technologies are being used to apply genetic concepts and learn more about genetics.
It's a good field to be in right now.
There's a lot of exciting things happening.
So as I mentioned before this drug that I'm studying we know that in a certain subset
of patients they get a really sever side effect.
So I'm directly trying to help those people and figure out why that happens to them.
So the end goal here would be to find whatever that cause is.
Find perhaps the genetic mutation that's causing that and I guess the exciting thing about
this is that we're kind of working directly with the drug company that makes this drug.
So if I do find a positive result if could very well translate directly to helping these
patients."