Beyond Locust Research Club

Thank you so much to Hana Matsuda for presenting at our meeting last Wednesday!

Hana is a rising junior studying bioengineering with an intended concentration in immune engineering and therapeutics. This past summer, Hana worked as a full-time researcher in Dr. Hammer's lab in cellular engineering as part of the Rachleff Scholars Program summer research experience. Using protein condensates, her project aims to develop a new toolkit to switch on and off the motility of immune cells with a pulse of light!

**ALSO! This was our last meeting of the summer :') If you are interested in running Beyond Locust next summer please fill out this form! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeSvTm6cGNrs45fxX8QRTdth5tpibQhECzK3w8iVHEEnR_Ogw/viewform

Thanks so much to Zoey Kline for sharing her research on cancer immunotherapy, looking at how we can utilize the body's immune system to target cancer. Working in the Perelman School of Medicine at the Center for Cancer Immunotherapies, she has been working alongside Dr. Michael Milone and Dr. Fei Miao to complete a project on Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) design and CIITA knockout/knock-down trials.

Chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR T-Cells) are T cells that have been genetically engineered to produce an artificial T cell receptor for use in immunotherapy. This kind of therapy has been proven to be extremely effective in liquid cancers, but not so much so in solid tumors.

Looking forward to next week's meeting!

Beyond Locust Interest Form: https://docs.google.com/.../1deXoFlC9p7jz6kvM1u.../ed

Thank you to Hannah Jin for sharing her research on cognitive reserve among frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) patients at our last meeting! FTD refers to a family of neurodegenerative diseases that typically causes cognitive impairment in executive function, behavioral regulation, or language ability among adults in their 50s and 60s. She has been examining how occupation could serve as a proxy for cognitive reserve.

Looking forward to our next meeting Wednesday, 7/13 at 8:30pm EST! This one will be a humanities presentation :)

Beyond Locust Interest Form: https://docs.google.com/.../1deXoFlC9p7jz6kvM1u.../edit