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"Hi. My name is Deanna Janzen. I work in the Memarzadeh Lab at UCLA. I'm a PhD scientist
there and basically what I do is I study women's cancers to see why they might form and to
try and find better ways to cure the cancers.
One of the cancers we study is Endometrial Cancer. Usually this is treated by surgery.
It has a lot of side effects. One of the ways we're looking to treat it is to use a hormone
that women normally have in their body, progesterone. So doses of progesterone can sometimes cure
the Endometrial Cancer but it only works for certain women. We're trying to find out ways
to determine which women this therapy will work on and are there other drugs we can give
with the progesterone to make it more effective.
I grew up in Wisconsin right around the Milwaukee area. It's about 90 miles north of Chicago.
I actually was always drawn to science. It was my favorite subject in school. I just
like finding out the ways things work.
My mother started out as a secretary and then she was an accountant. When I tried to explain
what I do to her it's sometimes very interesting. I'm sure she feels the same way when she tries
to explain loans and stocks and bonds to me. My dad was an accountant. I guess there's
a bit of a math background in my family but not necessarily science.
What's great about science to me is I come in to work every day and I have a new problem.
I don't have to do the same thing every day. I have experiments that are different from
day to day. There's always something new to learn. You've never reached your limit in
science. You've never found the final answer. There's always more you can ask about the
question.
One of the biggest things I do in the lab is I study populations of cells in cancers.
Particularly, right now, I'm looking at a series of Ovarian cancers. I'm trying to find
out why some cells in the cancer are able to evade common treatments like drugs that
are used to treat them.
If I can find out the cells are evading the therapy I might find ways to sensitive them
to the drugs or find other drugs that can kill these cells. Then that way we'd be able
to remove more of the tumor burden from people and hopefully prevent reoccurrence.
If we can find a way to just treat women with this hormone progesterone they wouldn't have
to undergo surgery. It's a lot less healing time and there's a lot less side effects.
Since progesterone's a natural substance you don't have a lot of side effects that you
would with chemotherapy or radiation. So patients feel healthier and they have a better quality
of life.
The tools are one of the fun parts of science. There are a lot of tools I get to work with.
I spend a lot of time on microscopes, I use regular light microscopes to look at cells
that I'm growing. I use fluorescent microscopes to look at cells that I've stained with antibodies
so I can see what proteins the cells express or where in the overall cancer a certain set
of cells would lie.
I do use math a lot and it's a very important skill. But I don't have to be a math genius.
I can use just basic math that I've learned early in my high school career to answer most
of the questions that I need. Whenever I have a question about math that I can't answer
there are always other people on campus that I go to.
There's times when I'll do a stretch of work by myself but there's a lot of interaction
in the lab. No one can answer all of the questions themselves. I'll do part of an experiment
and then I'll talk to someone else who's working on another part of the experiment and then
we'll compare our results and see how they interact with each other, what data we've
learned and how this comes together as a whole to answer the questions.
If I were going to talk to somebody about a career is science I'd tell them basically
just about the interesting things that you do. The fact that your job is different every
day. I don't go sit at a desk and punch at my computer and have to be in a meeting for
five hours at a time. I get to see different things. I get to go work on different machines.
There's always something new to learn. Being on a college campus is wonderful because there
are so many different places you can go to find out the answers to questions you don't
necessarily know."