Another great summer of undergraduate research
- Admin
- Sep 4
- 2 min read
Supporting undergraduate research is one of our lab's core missions and mentoring undergraduate summer students is always one of the highlights of the year. We're always amazed by what undergraduates are able to accomplish in a relatively short span of time, and this year was certainly no exception. We were fortunate to have two summer students join us: Alice Savasta, a physiology student from the University of Bristol, and Katy Sherborne, a medical student from the University of Cambridge.
Alice Savasta
Alice worked on the computational parasitology side of our lab, leading an important project on the transcriptomics of Trichinella spiralis, a nematode that can infect humans when they consume infected meat. She worked between our computational lab and Professor Katerina Artavanis-Tsakonas's wet lab in the Department of Pathology's Parasitology Division, providing exactly the type of energy and interdisciplinary leadership we needed for this project. She will now return to the University of Bristol for the final year of her undergraduate course, after which she will embark on what we're certain will be a very bright career in research.
Katy Sherborne
Katy joined us following the first year of her preclinical medical studies where she joined our computational oncology team. Despite having never programmed in C++ before, she took to it like a fish to water and engineered a new executable into our DNAscent software in only eight weeks. This added a fundamentally new functionality to the software that enables users to measure the frequency of DNA breaks in S-phase, and we are excited to release this feature in the very near future (stay tuned!). After spending the summer with us, Katy will start her second year of preclinical training and we look forward to seeing what she goes on to do in the future with her ability to combine medical training with a computational biology skillset.
We are grateful that these two outstanding scientists decided to spend their summer with us, and we are very proud of them for all that they have achieved. We are also grateful to St John's College and the British Division of the International Academy of Pathology for providing the funding that made their research possible.
