What got you interested in science?<\/b><\/p>\n
I just enjoyed the science classes I had in high school, and I was fairly good at them. I found them easier to study for than English or history because the textbook was interesting and easier to pick up. Science was just a subject that appealed to me.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Where did you go to school? What brought you to ISB?<\/b><\/p>\n I went to school at Otago University which is in the South Island of New Zealand and I did my Ph.D. at the Garvin Institute of Medical Research in \u00a0Sydney, Australia. This is my first postdoc experience. I wanted to learn a little bit more computation and Naeha is doing a lot of innate immunity which is something I am really interested in. The innate immune system is the lining of receptors that recognize bacteria, fungi, and viruses which I thought was a fascinating area of science.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is your daily work like?<\/b><\/p>\n I don\u2019t really have a typical day; every day is a bit different. I usually have cells in cultures so I check them regularly, but I also spend some time analyzing previous experiments and planning future ones. I have been doing some imaging recently so I take the grown cells and put them on the scope to take images.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Do you have a current or future project that you are most excited about?<\/b><\/p>\n I have got a bunch of different projects. I am working on the innate immune response to Lyme disease and I\u2019ve got some really cool data sets that I am excited to work with. We also have the brand new confocal microscope and I’ve acquired some really good images with it.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What are some of your hobbies?<\/b><\/p>\n During my Ph.D. I played a little bit of sport, but its harder to do that here. I ride my bike more often and because I live in Beacon Hill I get to ride around parts of Lake Washington which has a nice view.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Were you able to do a lot of research in school?<\/b><\/p>\n During my Ph.D. we did a lot of research but during my undergrad not so much. I managed to spend one summer in a lab during my undergrad and that was essentially the only research experience I got. The research labs that I did were all pretty structured; the experiments had been optimized by Ph.D. students, so we never had an experiment that failed or didn\u2019t work.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is your favorite part about ISB? What is collaboration like?<\/b><\/p>\n One of the things I really like is the location. They have UW medicine, Fred Hutch, CIDR, and UW Microbiology extremely close, so I really like how all the research communities are nearby because it makes collaborations very easy. I go to a lot of UW immunology talks; maybe every week or so. We have gotten to work with the instruments in their immunology lab which has been really cool.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What advice would you give a high schooler interested in a STEM career?<\/b><\/p>\n Just take a few science courses and if you really enjoy those, carry on with it. Also, remember that you don’t have to make your mind up now. When I was in college, I realized that I really liked science so I picked a wide variety of science courses and surprisingly I took more chemistry and physics courses but I enjoyed the biology-based ones more.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What got you interested in science? I just enjoyed the science classes I had in high school, and I was fairly good at them. I found them easier to study for than English or history because the textbook was interesting and easier to pick up. …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":721,"parent":22,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-714","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1104,"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/714\/revisions\/1104"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baliga.systemsbiology.net\/see-interns\/hs2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}