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Before I joined Dr. Dennis Hughes’ lab at the Children’s Cancer Hospital at MD
Anderson Cancer Center in December 2005, I received a B.S. in Biochemistry at
Texas A&M University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the UT-Houston
Health Science Center’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in 2002, where I
also did my graduate research at the UT-MD Anderson Cancer Center. I started
working in research labs while in college at TAMU at the College of Veterinary
Medicine and spent an interesting semester at the Whitney Marine Laboratory with
the University of Florida. This led to opportunities to work for a summer in
Taiwan, R.O.C. for a previous boss at TAMU, to work as a research assistant
again at TAMU, and then on to bigger and better things as a research assistant
at UT Medical School in Houston. I considered it an honor |
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to be listed as a co-author on seven peer-reviewed
publications by the time I applied to graduate school in 1996.
During graduate school, my research involved studying proteins that interact
with nucleic acids incur friend budding yeast, the microbe that gives us beer
and bread. This led to three additional publications and a NIH Predoctoral
Fellowship in Cancer Biology. Fate gently guided me to a post doctoral
fellowship for a world famous scientist at Tokyo University who used
cutting-edge biotechnology to identify genes involved in cancer metastasis (the
spreading of cancer to other tissues in the body) and in cell death. Even
though it was a valuable learning experience, working in Japan proved to be more
than my adventurous spirit could handle. I returned to Houston and worked at
the Breast Center at Baylor College of Medicine where I received a Susan G.
Komen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Breast Cancer Translational Research.
Currently in Dr. Hughes’ lab, we are studying how genes and
proteins work to cause bone cancer, osteosarcoma. Specifically, many patients
with bone cancer have their cancer spread to the lungs, which usually is the
reason why many patients don’t survive even after receiving surgery and
chemotherapy. We are interested in studying specific proteins and how they
affect the spread of bone cancer to the lungs, to target those proteins to
reduce the spread of cancer and to develop new drugs that will improve survival
and the quality of life in patients with bone cancer.
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