Austin, Texas: Summer Undergraduate Research Program at MD Anderson Cancer Center -Steven

This summer I had the privilege of spending 10 weeks working in Austin, Texas in a birth defects research laboratory.

The internship is funded by a grant jointly awarded to the MD Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas at Austin to encourage research in the biomedical sciences. I worked in the Finnell Birth Defects Research Laboratory located in the Dell Pediatric Research Institute on the University of Texas at Austin campus.

I worked with two post-doctoral fellows and the principal investigator, Dr. Richard H. Finnell on the characterization of the LMO6 Knockout Mouse Model. We found that C57BL/6 LMO6 knockout mice on folate deficient diets presents with some cases of microphthalmia.

As part of the internship we attend a weekly lunch lecture series developed by campus postdoctoral fellows to introduce basic scientific topics such as Molecular Carcinogenesis, animal models, molecular biology, flow cytometry and emerging analytic techniques.

About every other week there was a field trip of some sort. These included touring the Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine on the Bastrop campus, visiting the main MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, an ice cream social, and several other get togethers.

During the last week of the internship I presented the results of my summer research in one of the weekly lab meetings in the Finnell Lab. On the last day of the internship each intern presented a talk describing his or her research results as part of the SURP Scientific Symposium.

It was a wonderful opportunity to learn and be able to complete a research project through an internship hosted by a prestigious research university and a prestigious hospital. MD Anderson Cancer Center has been ranked the #1 cancer hospital in the country for the past six years¹ and University of Texas at Austin was ranked No. 30 on a list of the best 100 universities in the world².

I would recommend this internship to anyone interested in biomedical sciences research.

Analyzing embryo cells using the Operetta

Mouse dissection and embryo collection

Finnell Birth Defects Research Laboratory
Summer 2012

For more information on this internship:
Visit: http://sciencepark.mdanderson.org/outreach/students/undergrad/
View this year's SURP Brochure.