Young Alumnae Spotlight Melody Wu ‘18
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ne of the top reasons why students choose the Alverno experience is our amazing STEM program. Melody Wu ‘18, a current sophomore at MIT, is one of our many young alumnae taking ‘amazing’ to a whole other level. Melody’s team recently presented their project, The Perfect Swarm: Directed Migration of Neutrophil-Like Cells through Engineered Chemokine Secretion, at the iGEM Jamboree – an international synthetic biology competition. More impressive even than the title of their project, Melody and her team won a GOLD medal! We are so thrilled to shine a spotlight on Melody, who happily credits Ms. Barsever and the iGEM/HIRS (Honors Independent Research Science) program at Alverno for inspiring her pursuit of engineering and synthetic biology. Melody was kind enough to share the following excerpt from her own reflection featured in MIT’s Undergrad Research journal: For many MIT Biological Engineering students, there are so many opportunities to concentrate in various areas: from infectious diseases to biomechanics to immunoengineering, and so forth. At the root of many of these though, lie synthetic biology principles in engineering the basic building blocks of life to perform and further engineer the materials and macro biology we see. With that, what is iGEM? iGEM stands for the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition. Founded at MIT in 2003, it is now reaching more than 40 countries with over 300 teams across the world. To think about how fast biology has come forward, and how much we have SPRING 2020
Melody (kneeling, far right) and her iGEM team are all smiles
been able to engineer and the knowledge that has spread about it has always been an amazing thought. As a high schooler, I joined the iGEM community in 2016 as part of my all-girls high school’s first (and so far, only! — although I hope to see one again!!) team. Our project was a foundational advance track project on supercoiling (you can still find our site at 2016.igem. org/Team:Alverno_CA)! And I have my wonderful science teacher, Ms. Monica Barsever, and my teammates to thank for this experience. To me, this experience forever changed how I saw engineering. Not only as creating at the macroscale, but also looking at the microscale. And throughout the research process, you realize how many not-so-glorious experiences you have before reaching results that may or may not have any significance. However, as part of the iGEM community you realize you are not alone in those troubleshooting experiences and those failures and successes. This is especially the case whenever one goes to the iGEM Jamboree. Coming back to the Jamboree in 2019, now as part of the MIT iGEM Team, I am again in awe of the massive numbers of projects that people have created using synthetic biology — from synthetic milk, to creating biological sensors, to creating biodegradable plastics, to coculturing various bacterial strains, to creating cell swarms (our project this year! see our website here: 2019.igem.org/Team:MIT), to looking at Zika, to finding biological solutions to bee colony collapse, the list goes on. At the same time, it also made me realize that those late nights of continued on page 21 22
