LA students in the Research in Genetics Program who are currently involved in research projects designed by investigators at Princeton University recently collaborated with their mentors. The students, joined by LA instructor Dr. Susan Zusman, spent an exciting day at the university interacting with these Princeton investigators, hearing about their work and learning how their research contributes to the main research of the labs.
Students Zehan (Joanne) Ding ’24, Simrah Razvi ’24, Nandini Shah ’23, Sydney Racine ’23, Sanya Sidhu ’23, Martin Accilien ’24, Brianna Di Landro ’23, Andrew Wolff ’23, Naischa Puri ’23, Phyllis Liu ’23, Gbemi Olarewaju ’24 and Anting Luo ’23 learned a great deal from the trip and continued the preparations for their presentations to the school community on May 19 in the Oakwood Room.
The students met with three Princeton investigators including Dr. Jodi Schottenfeld-Roames, who studies trachea development in Drosophila; Dr. Rob Marmion, who works on the ras/mek signaling pathway in Drosophila which plays an important role in human development and disease; and Dr. Girish Deshpande, who works on the Hedgehog signaling pathway in Drosophila, also important in human development and disease.
The group was joined by Rudy Brandl ’83, Director of Communications and Publications, and LA alumni Shiv Tickoo ’22, Ariana Di Landro ’22 and Sydney Johnson ’20, who currently attend Princeton University as undergraduate students. Dr. Zusman is especially proud of Shiv, who will be doing an internship in Molecular Biology at Princeton this summer.
Other activities for the day included a visit to the Princeton University Science Museum, seeing Drosophila trachea under a high-powered confocal microscope, and having lunch in the newly built Genomics Café. It was an educational, exciting experience for the LA research students!