What are you currently working on?
Kelly Baines Graduate Student PhD Candidate Contact Info kbaines5@uwo.ca
“I'm in the process of wrapping up my PhD. I will be defending in three weeks. So, I'm not actively in the lab working on anything at the moment. To summarize my research, I looked at the role of the maternal immune system in regulating placental development and fetal development. I work primarily with a rodent model of inflammation. Some days are a lot more hectic in terms of collecting tissue, other days we're giving the pro-inflammatory treatment. Once the tissue is collected, that's when we do our analysis, which is more labor intensive. That includes techniques like RNA sequencing and qPCR, to quantify RNA levels and gene expression. I do a lot of immunohistochemistry, which is tissue sectioning and antibody staining, and Western blots to quantify protein levels within the tissue. I have also recorded wet weights, which is measuring organ and fetal sizes on the benchtop. I've also cultured rat trophoblast stem cells and neural precursor cells by doing isolations of cells from fetal brains. It is kind of intense, but it's really neat.”
What are some of your future goals from here? “My immediate goals are to finish my PhD - I'd like to finish up a couple of things with my project here. But I think I am leaving academia and pursuing an industry-based position. That's definitely a personal choice. I think that both have their pros and both have their cons. The opportunities in industry are quite different and broader than in research. There's not a lot of opportunity to try different roles within academia. Whereas within industry I'm applying very broadly. I've applied for scientific liaison positions, sales positions, research scientist positions. There are so many different opportunities out there and things that you don't even realize exist until you start digging.”
“You can do an experiment 10 times and not have it work. The one time that it does, you get this unique rush that people love.”
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