Page 15 - 2017-2018 ARCS Oregon Annual Report

system is recognizing as it destroys cancer cells. For
my project in particular, I worked with antibody and
T cells and showed that on average, they are more likely to recognize the same mutated cancer targets than would be expected by chance—which was the subject of presentations and my main paper from my PhD. This work is important
because target-specific
antibodies are much easier
to measure than target-
specific T cells, and lots of
groups currently developing
immune therapies have an
argument from my work
to try to measure immune
responses by the simpler
antibody method.
In the future, I think we’ll
be able to use screening of antibodies, in cancer patients and healthy people, to learn more about the immunologic origins of cancer. I think we’ll be able to predict
what is coming in advance, and perhaps even prevent many cancers with vaccines someday. That’s what I’d like to keep working on.
What awards or
recognition you have received?
I’ve won two travel awards to our SITC immunotherapy conference for the quality of my
science which is probably the most important, and I received a grant from OCTRI, which is funding a year of my graduate studies. I also won the Bob’s Red Mill Scholarship Speech Competition for a nutrition talk
I gave, and I got a Vimeo ‘Staff Pick’ for a short lava video I made on the way back from an immunotherapy
ALUM
Getting a PhD is a financially stressful adventure—you get to work on inspiring projects but are getting paid less than the average barista. The ARCS award helped give me enough of a financial buffer to pay off my undergrad loans and not worry about whether I’d be able to pay the rent or survive an emergency expense. It’s hard to say thank-you enough.
conference in Hawaii.
You’ve also produced films and are interested in photography.
Your photos are beautiful! How did you become interested in photography?
It kinda goes with the science actually. I watched a lot of documentary films growing up, which is a
big part of what inspired metowanttobeapartof the events I saw in nature and science programs.
I had wanted to come home to Oregon to get outdoors more, but found I wasn’t doing it very
much. I decided to teach myself photography and cinematography as an outlet to force me to get outside more. A PhD teaches you that you can teach yourself anything, and photography has been a fun way to make use of that and to give me something to ‘succeed’ at when experiments fail in the lab.
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