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My name is Christina Vorvis, and we're here at UCLA in the Center for Systems Biomedicine,
directed by Dr. Iliopoulos. I am a PhD candidate studying pancreatic cancer. Specifically I
study a protein that's expressed in normal pancreatic tissue, and it's not expressed
in cancer, and I'm trying to figure out why it's not being expressed in cancer and if
there's some correlation between the disease progression and the expression of this protein.
I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. I'm a scientist because I've been interested in science since
I was about eight years old. I remember asking for a microscope for my birthday one year
about that age, and so I always wanted to explore my surroundings. I remember walking
around my pool and collecting water samples, and going down the street to the pond to collect
some water, and looking at the differences between the bacteria that are living in the
different kinds of water. My parents don't have a high school-level education, and so
I was raised to study and pursue my passions according to what I was interested in, and
they were there to support me and not choose a particular path, but just pursue things
that I'm interested in. I lead a stem program "science, technology, engineering, math program"
for students coming from low income communities who are like myself, who don't have parents
who have gone to college, so they're trying to find ways to pursue their passion like
I was, so I'm there to teach them the basic molecular biology we do in the lab, and how
to know just some basic skills to be able to go into a lab and be productive. What motivated
me to get into science was a lack of information on the structure of DNA. So when I was in
college, people were starting to understand how DNA is compacted, and it sounds very basic,
and it is a very basic mechanism of DNA structure, but it has implications in diseases, if it
doesn't happen correctly, and so I wanted to understand what regulates the structure
of DNA and how it potentially could affect disease or aging. The goal of my research
was to figure out what molecules are suppressing the expression of this protein in cancer,
and I found a negative regulator of this protein, and it could potentially be used as a biomarker
to identify pancreatic cancer tissue, so the potential applications of my research is simply
a patients who has a genetic predisposition to pancreatic cancer could walk into the clinic,
get a blood test, and identify this marker that could be indicative of pancreatic cancer.
I'm studying a very, very small part of the big picture, and I think that if every researcher
can identify or reveal a part of the story, that together we can build the novel and understand
the idea of how this disease progresses, and ultimately how we can cure the disease before
it begins. If you're somebody who thrives on failure, then research is for you, and
oftentimes failure is the pathway to success. If you're thinking about pursuing a career
in biomedical research, I would advise that you pursue a subject that you're heavily interested
in, but I would also advise you to seek out somebody that- or an advisor, mentor that
you really connect with and can relate to. You can have the technical knowledge and the
skill set in the laboratory, but it's actually more valuable if you can find the way to translate
that into the public, and having your research and your findings accessible in some way.