After completing 2 weeks of highly interesting and challenging activities from the Fred Hutch Explorers Program, my interest and passion have reached an all-time high. Being surrounded by fellow students striving to fulfill our academic passion and by established scientists kindly donating their time to explain their pathways has left me with a positive outlook on my future.
In particular, I was moved by the presentation given by Dr. Katusiime, an HIV researcher at [the NIH], showing me that everyone's pathways and/or passions are different and can change. She also emphasized motivation, not luck, are what allows people to follow their dream jobs. I reached out to her, and she kindly responded to a couple questions that related to my personal career curiosities. The first question was “What is an average day in your current position?” She detailed a day beginning at 9 o’clock that begins with updating herself on the relevant publications published recently and then spends the majority of the day in the lab planning or running her experiments. Her duties range from attending a variety of trainings to giving talks about her work to analyzing data from previous experiments. This incredibly interested me because of the consistent nature of her job while allowing for new experiences every day on the job. She also explained that maintaining a work and personal life balance is as difficult as it sounds and that her first experience within Medical Virology helped direct her career path.
Screenshot from Dr. Katusiime’s presentation
Since I was able to get in contact with the kind Dr. Katusiime, I took the opportunity to ask her about a study published earlier last year that used specific cases of HIV superinfections (one patient with two variants of HIV) to discover the most efficient way to target the HIV cells. More specifically, this study, published by Dr. Rossana Colon-Thillet, targeted their DNA reservoir, which allows them to replicate regardless of antiretroviral therapy that successfully “froze” most of the cell’s ability. This study clearly succeeded in their efforts and identified that the reservoir is seeded just before antiretroviral therapy is initiated so Dr. Katusiime explained to me that current efforts to eliminate the reservoir are to re-awaken the cells to be recognized and cleared by the immune cells or by enhancing immune-mediated control of virus replication.
HIV sequences obtained from lab showing reservoir sequences are at time points close to and before antiretroviral therapy begins.
Image Provided by Dr. Dara Lehman
In summary, my experience at Fred Hutch helped expand my knowledge of what is possible and my role models to look up to that are succeeding in careers in STEM.
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