Genetic Engineering
Alumnae in Academic Fields
GE majors have been very successful as college professors and working as research technicians in Biomedical research labs. Some examples include:Elise Holvey-Bates
Research Assistant at Case Western Reserve University
I collect discarded human tissues from surgeries taking place at the University Hospitals of Cleveland, and then prepare them according to researcher's specifications. I work with mainly cancerous tissues (especially colon, lung, breast,and brain cancer) as well as normal tissues. I am also in charge of maintaining the bio-repository funded by the Ireland Cancer Center, where we provide long-term storage of tissues to later be supplied for large research projects that require hundreds of samples at once.
Christie Hay
Research Technician I
Christie works as a reasearcher at the Staff Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health at Duke University Medical Center.
Sonia L. Planey
Assistant Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Basic Sciences at the Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton, PA.
She received her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Thomas Jefferson University and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Florida, where she was promoted to Research Assistant Professor. She has also held industry positions at Medarex Inc., in Bloomsbury, NJ and at Genaera Corporation in Plymouth Meeting, PA. Her primary research interests are in signal transduction and cancer biology.
Research Interests:My research interests are primarily in signal transduction and cancer biology. I have spent the last few years studying protein palmitoylation and developing a proteomic method to identify substrates of palmitoyl acyl transferases (PATs)—the enzymes that mediate palmitoylation. Despite their recent discovery (2002), many PATs have already been linked to human disease. One compelling example is the association of ZDHHC2 with cancer. ZDHHC2 encodes the PAT, DHHC2, and is deleted in many types of cancer. Its absence in cells is highly correlated with metastasis; therefore, investigating the function of this gene in established cancer cell lines will allow me to better understand its role in preventing metastasis. DHHC2 modifies specific cellular proteins with a small, regulatory lipid called palmitate. One substrate of this enzyme is CKAP4/p63 which is a cell-surface receptor for antiproliferative factor (APF)—a small molecule that is thought to cause a painful, chronic bladder disorder called interstitial cystitis. The signaling networks under the control of the ZDHHC2 gene are important to cancer and bladder disease and are the current focus of my research.
Last Updated: 8/13/10
