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Hi, my name is Brandon Anjuwon-Foster. I'm a third-year graduate student in the department
of microbiology and immunology, here at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill.
So, I went to George Mason University in northern Virginia. I have a Bachelor of Science in
Neuroscience.
So I study the organism clostridium difficile. It causes a diarrheal disease, and I'm interested
in understanding how the organism attaches to your gut. And specifically, how attachment
to your gut is regulated. I mean, one of the other things that I look at, in terms of C-DIFF,
are these things called toxins. And these toxins are responsible for a lot of the diarrhea
that patients get. And so we look at how gene products are responsible for causing the diarrhea
and how they are regulated in the organism. So clostridium difficile is unique amongst
bacterial pathogens in that it can adopt to lifestyles. One as a vegetative cell, just
a traditional organism, a bacterium, and another as a metabolically dormant spore, so structures
that can persist in the environment.
What motivated me to make the switch from behavioral neuroscience research to infectious
disease research is that it doesn't matter what country you're in and whether it's a
more developed country, infectious diseases are a problem everywhere. It really just depends
on really the kind pathogen. I think here in the United States most of the pathogens
that are responsible for a lot of the disease are those that are hospital acquired. Whereas
in impoverished countries like Haiti, there are issues with the infrastructure and so
they see a lot of cholera disease. It's another pathogen that causes diarrheal disease. And
so I realized that if I were to spend my time during infectious disease research, I could
potentially impact people across the globe, not just here in the U.S. but in other countries.
My long-term hope or goal is that some of the publications that come from my research
are potentially incorporated maybe into vaccine development or drug development for clostridium
difficile or maybe some other diarrheal pathogen.
So, students that might be curious about bench research, I definitely think they should talk
to the professors that are teaching a lot of their courses, or seek out opportunities
in the local area. Like, there are a lot of hospitals that sometimes will allow students
to intern and some of these hospitals might have research labs and you can see if the
research is for you. For me, speaking to P.I.'s, Principal Investigators, and college professors,
this allowed me to determine that I really liked research and then taking that leap of
faith and doing a summer research program. And most of these summer research programs,
they're, or ones throughout the country and a lot of them are paid for, so you don't have
to worry about the finances. And doing this eight- or ten-week internship will allow you
to figure out, do you like research.