Greenhill US Students Complete Summer STARS Internship

Rising seniors Priya Agrawal and Shivani Daftary concluded their summer internship with the STARS (Science Teacher Access to Resources at Southwestern) summer program at UT Southwestern Medical Center and presented the work to a group of researchers and fellow interns this past weekend.Agrawal interned in the Department of Pharmacology where she worked under the direction of Dr. Xuelian Luo, who works to gain insight into the structures of the components of the Hippo Tumor Suppressor Pathway (a signaling sequence that controls the growth of organs and cancerous tumors). Agrawal's project consisted of purifying a protein (L1MD1) that is a potential inhibitor of this pathyway and results in aggressive tumor growth.Daftary spent her summer interning in the Psychoneuroendocrinology Research Lab under the direction of Dr. Sherwood Brown. The rising senior gathered data from previous studies that Brown conducted, analyzed the data then wrote a scientific paper about the findings that were submitted into the Journal for Affective Disorders. Her research investigated the impact of pregnenolone (an over-the-counter nutritional supplement) and examined whether microtubule associated protein-2 levels in the blood differed between people with bipolar depression and healthy controls.During their internships, Agrawal and Daftary attended weekly seminars where leading researchers talked about their work and how it impacted the real world.