Heejoon Shin, COL ’26, Baton Rouge, LA
Over the 2024 Summer, I had the pleasure to work under Dr. Laurence C. Eisenlohr to immerse myself in immunology research. As an undergraduate student wanting to pursue research that intersects biochemistry, immunology, and protein analysis as a career, this summer was the perfect opportunity to grow as a scientist. Through the University of Pennsylvania’s Career Service funding, I was able to freely exercise my critical thinking skills and expand my scientific techniques.
Poxviruses infect a wide variety of animals with extensive set of immunomodulatory proteins that help facilitate their infection. In the lab, I worked to fully understand a specific immunoregulatory protein called A35R which was first described in vaccinia virus (VACV) and conserved across most orthopoxviruses. The orthopovirus genus is of great importance because of its substantial threat to human populations via zoonotic transmissions. Hence, over the summer, I investigated how A35R impacted MHC Class I and II presentations and compared the homologous protein in ectromelia virus to understand the potential conserved function of A35R across the orthopoxviruses.
To investigate A35R to the extent that I wanted to, this meant that I needed to grow my technical and critical thinking skills. With the help of my graduate student mentor, Stephen D. Carro, I was able to improve both skills at an incredible pace.
Under Stephen’s mentorship, I was exposed to numerous biological techniques to tackle a variety of different questions about A35R and to confirm results from an orthogonal approach. These techniques included establishing colonies, purifying DNA, performing numerous assays (western blotting, flow cytometry, fluorescent β galactosidase assay), and even conducting antibody purifications. While I was not great at performing these experiments at first, I was able work efficiently with progressively cleaner data through several trials.
Indeed, performing numerous experiments meant that I had to be highly organized. I had to be organized of what experiments I had conducted and the results that I got from each trial. This meant that I had to quickly adapt to a style of note-taking that I was comfortable with that was efficient and easy to read. Being organized also meant scheduling how I would spend my time in the lab as well. Since research was not a typical “9 to 5” job and had flexible work hours, this meant I had to be cautious of not wasting my time, but also make sure that I wasn’t overworking myself.
Additionally, my research experience also exercised my critical thinking ability. Through journal clubs and literature reading, I can gain substantial knowledge about immunology that I could integrate into my project. For instance, I learned new background knowledge that could help me draw conclusions from my data and learned new experimental techniques that could improve my current methodologies. Critical thinking also came in the form of troubleshooting my experiments, too. Sometimes my results presented contradictory data or even data that did not make sense. From here, I critically thought what I may have done differently in terms of technique, analysis, or even conditions that I had placed. This required me to be constantly aware of what I was doing, understand the purpose of certain procedures, and try to pinpoint what variable I have changed to gain varying data. Through the help of my graduate mentor, I was able to exercise and improve my critical thinking ability.
Overall, through the UPenn Career Service funding, I was able to gain several valuable technical and critical thinking skills from Dr. Eisenlohr lab, and this experience helped solidify my interest in pursuing a professional career in research.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2024 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
