Sydney Burkholder the Magnificent!

I've been working with Sydney for these past two summers and it's certainly been exciting if nothing else. Since Sydney worked upstairs in the pharmaceutical department so I never really saw her work environment. Until this year when I ventured her room. It looked just like our chemistry labs. Looks like all science is just messy.





In this picture, Sydney is pipeting cells and splitting them among 35 mm plates. She's doing this to be able to treat the cells with different concentrations of novel compounds. Once all the plates are treated, Sydney will lyse the cells. This allows her to eventually run a protein assay and a western blot analysis.



Sydney's project involves a very serious problem, Breast Cancer, which is a leading cause of death particularly involving women. She works exclusively with Extracellular signal-regulated kinase 5 (ERK5)an understanding it's role in breast cancer research. Hopefully, advancements in this research can lead to possible therapies in breast cancer.






















As you can see, Sydney's work is not only intriguing but important as well. And her work has certainly helped the ongoing progress of breast cancer research. Great job!