Shreya Roy

I am currently completing the final year of my undergraduate degree in Microbiology at the University of Washington. I love the field and would like to integrate it with my passion for working with patients and their families. Upon graduating, I want a career in health care where I can bridge the gap between health care providers and the patients they treat. As a senior undergraduate researcher my role is not only to serve as an extra set of hands for my team, but also oversee the logistics of the project. Finding a preservation technique that would keep cellular components like nucleic acids and proteins in native structure for the long term opens doors to other advancements in medicine. For example, better preservation technology will improve diagnostics of biopsy samples and provide opportunity for secondary analysis of an original sample should a cancer patient relapse. In the future, this project has the possibility to be applicable to keeping live organ tissue stable enough to travel longer distances at room temperature. This means reaching a transplant patient in need who may have been out of range using other methods. Following this project through each step is important to me, as it gives me exposure to a variety of skills vital to any career: lab work, budget management, protocol execution, and project management.

July 2018