Thesis Thursday

I was born in Mexico City and came to the United States at the age of nine years old.  Going back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico became a central part of my identity and fuels my drive to work on improving environmental and living conditions for people of both countries.  I received my B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California and later went on to work in public health with the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency.  Recognizing the link between the health of our environment and human health, I decided to venture on a daunting journey and began taking chemistry and biology classes at night to pursue this new-found interest.  I feel very fortunate to be a M.S. student in Environmental Science at the University of Arizona where I have a unique opportunity to work on binational environmental and health-related efforts- for the environment knows no borders.  On my spare time, I enjoy spending time with family, running, and practicing son jarocho.

Madison is a senior at the University of Arizona majoring in Mathematics. She is a native Arizonian and attended Millennium High School in Goodyear, AZ.

She started college with the hope of working in healthcare, but became interested in mathematics during her first semester in Vector Calculus and decided to combine these two interests by doing research with Dr. Timothy Secomb in the UA Department of Physiology. As part of this lab, Madison uses a pencil and paper along with mathematical ideas to investigate blood flow regulation in the brain from a completely theoretical point of view. While she enjoys the medical aspects of the project, she has gravitated towards the mathematical theory, and decided to pursue a PhD in Mathematics instead.

Madison hopes to conduct research in algebraic geometry, which combines the intuition of geometric pictures and the concreteness of algebraic calculations. As such she is doing her senior thesis with Dr. Douglas Ulmer on Function Fields, which are one of the algebraic tools used in algebraic geometry. This area is particularly important in cryptography, which protects information online from being stolen. Madison will graduate this May and start graduate school in August at the University of Utah, with her eventual goal being a research career, either at a university or for a company doing cryptanalysis. In her free time, Madison enjoys riding motorcycles, hiking, doing ballet, and drinking coffee.

My name is Mac McGraw, and I’m a sophomore at the University of Arizona double majoring in Pre-Physiology and Molecular and Cellular Biology with a minor in Health and Human Values. I decided to attend the University and study pre-medicine due to my personal experience with type one diabetes and desire to help other people fighting the same battle. I’m currently working in Dr. Klearchos Papas’s lab, which focuses on alternative treatments for type one diabetes using cellular encapsulation. By adding insulin-producing cells to a device that blocks that immune system from attacking the cells, this technology will theoretically replace current insulin injection and pump therapy. I’m specifically investigating ideal cell culture conditions as insight for usage in these encapsulation devices. When I’m not in lab, you can catch me going for runs, listening to music, learning about cars, or video editing.

Hello, my name is Nic Peña, I am a senior at the University of Arizona studying neuroscience and biochemistry. I work in the laboratory of Dr. Daniela Zarnescu investigating cellular and genetic mechanisms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. I am particularly interested in protein synthesis dysregulation in our fruit fly model of ALS. I plan to continue studying the basic science of neurological disease as a neuroscience Ph.D. student. In my free time, I enjoy playing basketball and tennis, hanging with my dogs Leia and Barron, or trying out new places to eat in Tucson.

Hello! My name is Dorothy Tung, and I am a junior majoring in neuroscience and cognitive science at the University of Arizona. I work with Dr. Brian McKay in an ophthalmology lab that studies age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of irreversible blindness. My project investigates the degradation rate of photoreceptor outer segments by the retinal pigment epithelium. After graduation, I hope to attend medical school and eventually serve on medical mission trips. During my free time, I enjoy hiking, bowling, playing the piano, and spending time with my family.

My name is Hui Li and I am a Post-Doctoral research fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology under…

Emily Dieckman is the host of the KCI podcast Love in the Time of Everyone, a show about how the…

My name is Hui Li and I am a Post-Doctoral research fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology under the direction of Dr. Xinxin Ding and Dr. Qing-yu Zhang.  I am working on a project related to role of Hmox1 in the effects of arsenic in drinking water.

Emily Dieckman is the host of the KCI podcast Love in the Time of Everyone, a show about how the way we navigate relationships has changed over time. She studied journalism as an undergraduate at California State University, Fullerton, and sociology as a graduate student at Arizona State University. The show aims to combine the two fields by featuring stories from interviewees placed in a larger sociological context. As a fairly anxious and generally unorganized person, she does several other things, including writing for the Tucson Weekly and the Tucson Dog Magazine, volunteering with Literacy Connects, taking Spanish classes through ASU, going on morning runs with her dog, and baking a lot of bread (thanks, quarantine!) to fuel all of the above. In her day job, she writes about some of the very cool work researchers, students and alumni of the University of Arizona are doing.

To hear the program Love in the Time of Everyone you can find it here

Hi! My name is Kamila Murawska-Wlodarczyk, and I am a PhD student in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the…