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My name is Stacy Webb. This is the Dutch lab and I am a graduate research assistant.
I grew up in Dayton, Ohio. There are no scientists in the family. I am actually a first generation
college student. I had a high school science teacher who really fostered science. She was
a physics teacher. And then when I got into college, finding the science classes most
interesting kind of led me to a career in science. I went to college in Western Kentucky.
Kentucky Wesleyan College. I got my degree in chemistry. And now I am studying biochemistry
to get my PhD. I started to do a research project at Kentucky Wesleyan and the thing
that really caught me was that when I was doing that research project, there was a moment
where I realized I was the first person to see something and that was really exciting
and I wanted to pursue that further.
We have a great lab. It's fun. We are always looking out for each other. We have very distinct projects that we're definitely
very aware of what the others are doing. So day to day, typically I'll come in and first
thing I always check my emails to see if there is anything I need to respond to and then
I'll get experiments started typically something with cell culture and go through that through
the day. And then usually I wind up my day by updating my lab notebook and just making
sure I remember everything I did that day.
In our lab, we study respiratory virus. We study a family that includes measles, mumps,
those very important pathogens. And the virus I specifically study is called the Henda virus.
It's a very dangerous virus. It infects humans and animals and what I'm specifically looking
at is some of the entry mechanisms of that virus. There are these proteins that cover
the surface of the virus and we want to see how those contribute to viral entry, getting
into the cell. So how does a virus attach to a human cell, enter and then do all the
awful things that cause us to be sick.
The Henda virus isn't a virus that's widely studied. And so what I'm doing is very novel.
The surface proteins that I study I'm looking at a very hydrophobic part of the protein,
which is something most people don't do, and so it's exciting to be doing something different
and it also makes it difficult, but it's led to some very interesting new avenues. So the
future would be viral therapeutics. We want to look at how we can develop therapeutics
more broadly. So the idea that maybe what we're looking at now could be applied beyond
just this one specific virus and then maybe that it could be applied to a family. And
so that would be amazing for world health. It's a very big picture but it would be a
very big step.
You get an idea in your mind and you go through an experiment and in your head it makes perfect
sense but then you have to get it to some point where you need to present it to an audience
that maybe doesn't think the same way you do or have the same background. But you want
to convey an idea that is important to you and is going to be important to them. So that's
definitely the most challenging part for me.
When I did my interviews, I was in this region and it was just, it felt right when I was
here doing the interviews. Ultimately, I ended up loving Becky Dutch. She's an amazing mentor
to have and so that's why I ended up finding myself here. UK is an amazing place to do
science. There's a great environment here. The researchers are very open to communication.
They're very open to share. It's been a very nurturing environment. There is not this terrible
sense of intense competitiveness. It's a very family environment and it's been great so
far.
Science matters because it's what's going to keep moving us forward as a species. We
have to keep learning about how to stay healthy, how to fight these microorganisms that, like
viruses. It's what's going to keep us on top. So I think it's very important to study science.