Our summer was filled with many new experiences for everyone.
To start off, we attended the celebration of Aanandi’s nuptials.
We were excited to host a summer undergraduate research student from the University of Evansville, Indiana. Audrey Chambers was supported by an NSF fellowship and worked under the mentorship of Elizabeth Mendes on cell state in fusion-positive RMS, where she learned experimental design with shRNA knockdowns and small molecule inhibitors. She also learned to do qPCR, Western blots, and cell culture. Audrey celebrated the 4th of July with us at Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, and enjoyed a host of ethnic foods from around the Triangle area at the Raleigh International Food Festival. Audrey will go on to her senior year at her university and plans on applying to PhD programs to cultivate her future as a scientist.
We said goodbye to a freshly graduated medical fellow – Dr. Brian Guedes – who specialized in Pediatric Hematology-Oncology. He is enjoying time with his family and settling into the role of a physician specialist at the All Children’s Hospital in Florida. While at Duke he was the chief fellow in his program and worked on novel kinase targets in fusion-positive RMS. We wish him the best!
Joining our lab is Dr. George Turco, a second-year medical fellow in the Duke Pediatric Hematology-Oncology program. George will work with Aanandi, our research tech testing new pharmacologic agents in fusion-negative RMS and fusion-positive RMS. He is currently working on honing his cell culture skills and learning new wet lab techniques such as Western blots and cloning. To celebrate George’s new role and to say goodbye to Audrey after an eventful summer, we held a bowling outing which George won, leaving everyone far, far behind!!
We have also loved having Dr. Leen Barbar, an MD from Syria, in our lab as a research scholar.
Lastly, we are grateful to Sam Weitzel for her efforts in our lab. Sam is now a junior and looks forward to exploring other scientific projects at Duke to expand her repertoire of molecular assays.
