Undergraduate Research

I earned a B.A. in 2015 from Smith College, where I studied biochemistry and neuroscience. As an undergraduate, I began working in the laboratory to understand how Brugia malayi parasites carried by mosquitoes evade the human immune system after crawling in through mosquito bite wounds on human skin. If successful in their invasion strategy, these parasites wreak havoc, leaving their human hosts with severely disfiguring and disabling conditions like elephantiasis. In tropical and subtropical regions, millions of people are at risk annually, and these millions are among the world’s poorest. Those infected often face further repercussions; they are physically unable to perform laborious work and are stigmatized because of their disfigurement. These physical effects further result in crippling economic losses and shattered mental health.

How are parasites such as these so successful at surviving in the hostile environment of the human body? What constitutes the human immune system’s arsenal of defense tactics against these invaders? What allows either the host or the parasite to win — or lose? How do different organisms co-evolve within ecosystems to adapt and to survive, seemingly locked in competition over millions of years of evolution? From my initial years in science mulling over these quandaries and tinkering with experiments in the laboratory, I became fascinated by these fundamental questions about the natural world, which are conceptually important for providing explanations at levels ranging from genes to behaviour.