I’m Shelby Meier and I’m in Joe Abisambra’s lab, and I’m a graduate research assistant.
I grew up in a really small town in northern Kentucky. It’s called Independence, Kentucky.
There’s maybe only like 10,000 people there, and then I moved here to Lexington to go to college.
There are no scientists in my family, but medicine has always been in my family.
My Mom is a nurse and my great grandfather was a doctor, so I’ve kind of always had
that running in there. In my father’s side, they’re all more business and accounting
and all of that, which is not my forte at all. I had a lot of different things that
I wanted to be as a kid. I wanted to be a pediatrician at one point, a journalist, an
actress, and then once I got a little older, I kind of finally settled in on medicine and
wanting to be an orthopedic surgeon. I actually joined at Joe’s lab to boost my resume for
med school. I started doing undergraduate research my sophomore year and I came in here
and I got a lot of experience, and for all of my undergraduate time I had still planned
on going to med school. And then about three days before the graduate school deadlines
for applications, I decided I wanted to go to grad school and stick with science. I just
couldn’t give up doing my research in here. I did my undergrad here at UK and I’m continuing
my post-grad work here at UK in the Integrated Biomedical Sciences Program. And so, I’ll
be getting my PhD and I’ll be joining Joe’s lab. And so, my PhD will be in physiology
and my PhD work is hopefully going to focus on protein synthesis and progressive and injury
induced tauopathies. As cheesy as this sounds, a lot of my inspiration has come from Joe.
This was my very first research lab that I’ve been in and Joe has afforded me every opportunity
to experience the best parts of science. I’ve gone to conferences, I’ve won poster awards,
I’ve gotten to present at different places, I’ll be getting to go to international conferences
this coming year. And besides all of that, Joe’s scientific integrity and his creativity
in the work he does, it motivates me a lot to have the highest standard in all of my
work as well. The most challenging aspect is definitely when something doesn’t go
my way. I’m very competitive. So I have a very high standard for myself and when I
don’t get the results I want, I always have to take a deep breath, realize it’s not
the end of the world, and keep pushing forward. But, it’s always very rewarding when you
do have that huge challenge to overcome or there’s something that someone has said
it won’t work, “There’s no way it’s going to work” and you’re able to show
it does work or it’s here or something’s happening, and you’re that first person
to show that. So that’s really rewarding. The big focus in our lab is neurodegeneration
and the endoplasmic reticulum, and we’re looking at inhibition of a specific kinase.
And so, I have been very involved in that project – treating the animals and studying
how inhibition of this kinase affects pathology of the disease and neurodegeneration in general.
And from some preliminary data, we’ve seen a little bit of tissue sparing, a little bit
of activation of an immune response. So that would be absolutely incredible to have some
sort of drug that we could give people after they received a traumatic brain injury, that
would reduce some of the long-term side effects like mood swings or memory loss. And a lot
of traumatic brain injuries are linked to an increase for your chance of Alzheimer’s
disease or other neurodegenerative diseases. UK is one of the best research environments
that I’ve ever seen. The collaboration here is incredible. Not only that, but your upper
level people – your P.I.’s your senior research investigators – they are so helpful
and so welcoming. They’re very well trained, but they can bring me in and they can say,
“Okay, here’s the basics, here’s what you need to understand, and this is what we’re
going to teach you.” So it’s a really great environment to learn and feel comfortable
making mistakes so that you can learn what you really need to know. I actually, as an
undergrad, swore off research. I thought science was boring. The only experience I had was
in a chemistry lab, which was titrations and pHing buffers, and it was so boring and I
thought that that was going to be exactly what I would do in here, but it’s nothing
like that and it’s some of the most interesting work I’ve ever done. So get out there. It
may be a little scary. You definitely have to put your best foot forward and you kind
of have to reach out to them, but people are more than willing to help so don’t be scared
to do it. Science matters because it infiltrates absolutely everything we do. We’re all very
worried about our health and there’s talk about vaccines and which foods are good to
eat – genetically modified organisms. And without any of this science that we’re doing,
a lot of those discoveries wouldn’t have happened and we wouldn’t be where we are
today, whether that’s in medicine or technology or just about any aspect of your life.
So it’s very important.