My name is Bradley Coleman.
I'm a postdoc in the Gubbels Laboratory in the biology department at Boston College.
The lab studies toxoplasma gondii, which is a single cell parasite that lives inside of
a host cell.
A host cell can be humans or it can be other animals as well.
So I study the different processes and proteins that are involved with the hope that maybe
we can identify the targets that can be used for drugs.
I'm from New Jersey originally.
From as early as I can remember I was always interested in science in some way or another
and I remember just always really loving biology classes and watching nature shows on television,
that was what I did.
When I was watching TV, I was watching shows about animals.
I wanted to be an astronaut for a very long time, as do I think most kids do.
So I pursued that as biology major, never knowing exactly what that would turn into.
I didn't know any scientists and actually I think I didn't know what it meant to be
a scientist until probably I was part way through college.
Then I started working in a lab and I got to see what research was really like.
So I did a rotation in a lab that studied asthma and one that studied cancer genetics
and then the last rotation that I did was in a lab that studied malaria which is interesting
to me because it's a parasite, but also because it's a neglected disease that you know, kills
people, hundreds of thousands of people a year, but doesn't get a lot of attention.
That really struck me and then the parasite that I study now, toxoplasma gondii, is a
related parasite to the parasite that causes malaria.
I study proteins, we actually take the parasite itself and we will mess with the version of
that particular protein that we're interested in, in the parasite.
And you create pieces of DNA at the bench, that have a certain sequence that can then
go into the gene of the parasite itself, so that's the parasite's copy of the genome that
goes made.
So this is going to spin this tube really fast because the DNA we want is in the liquid
stuff, so all that stuff is going to spin down to the bottom, we're going to throw it
and we're going to keep the liquid that floats up to the top.
What is it about that particular protein at this particular moment in the parasite's life
that is so important and why does the parasite die when you get rid of it?
So that's the basic biology question that we're trying to answer.
What's called a transgenic version of the parasite?
No two people in the lab are working on exactly the same project but we're working on different
processes in the same parasite, so we can always ask each other for ideas or ask each
other for advice and then things start to funnel together.
One person does a certain experiment and we think, oh that would be a cool experiment
for me to do with my protein and so then I'll try it and then my results might be similar
but not exactly the same as the other persons and then we can talk about why they're different
and why they're similar and what that might mean for the parasite as a whole.
And so those sorts of interactions really I think further the projects of all the people.
I think that anybody that works on a parasite or anything that causes a disease, the hope
is always that your research is going to translate into a cure or a treatment for that disease
because that is making people sick or killing people and in my case, you know, it's not
just for toxoplasmosis, which is the disease that toxoplasma causes but potentially for
malaria as well because it's a related parasite.
What I love about being a scientist is discovery and that you never quite know where it's going
to take you.
So it's always exciting and it's always a bit unpredictable and on top of that, you're
sort of making a contribution to knowledge of the world, of you know, every time you
make a discovery at the lab bench, it's something that no one else has known until you just
figured it out and you can't really beat that.