Sophia Liu, COL ’26, Cincinnati, OH
Most people spend their summers at the beach, maybe with sand between their toes. I spent mine with flies crawling up the sides of test tubes. Not the houseflies buzzing around your picnic, but fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, tiny creatures that turned out to be my unexpected lab partners in the Song Lab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
This was my second summer as a Career Services Summer Funding Grant recipient, and while the protocols were the same as the year before, this year brought a whole new set of challenges (and flies). My project aims to determine whether certain genes are critical for neurodevelopment, and whether the variants found in patients are pathogenic. These patients often present with unexplained neurodevelopmental phenotypes (such as epilepsy, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and intellectual disability) and by modeling their genetic variants in fruit flies, we can watch their behavior and begin to uncover how these changes might contribute to disease. Sounds simple, but the “watching” part can be surprisingly entertaining.
Take the climbing assay, a test meant to identify motor deficits, for example. You place a group of flies in a vial, tap them to the bottom, and see how many can scale the walls in ten seconds. Some zoom straight up; others just…sit there. Then there’s the social space assay, where flies are spread in a chamber and their spacing is measured. Most give each other a respectful fly-sized bubble, but some cluster together or keep oddly far apart—behaviors that can mirror social challenges in humans. My favorite was the seizure assay. By heating the flies, we could see whether they seized up, toppled, and flailed. It sounds dramatic (and it is), but the results are incredibly informative. Who knew fruit flies could be both research subjects and unintentional entertainers?
Between the assays and countless dissections, I realized how much I had grown since last summer. Back then, I was learning techniques; this year, I was planning experiments weeks ahead, predicting outcomes, and making adjustments when things didn’t go as planned. I stopped seeing setbacks as failures and started treating them as puzzles to solve. I also found myself more confident speaking up in lab meetings, presenting my data, and even leading journal clubs. Somewhere between fly climbing races and dissection marathons, I began to feel less like a student and more like a researcher.
What struck me most, though, was how these tiny experiments add up to something much larger. Each vial of flies, each assay, is one piece of a puzzle that could one day make a difference for patients and families. For me, it was both a humbling and motivating realization.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the Career Services Summer Funding Grant. Having received it for a second year, I can say it has not only supported my research but also shaped how I see myself as a scientist. I’m grateful for the opportunity, the growth, and yes, even the flies.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2025 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
