2023 Summer Internship
Special thank you to Dr. Ali Gharavi for spearheading this program.
We are excited to have welcomed summer interns to our program this year, especially after three long years of holding our internship virtually. CPMG strives to provide a meaningful experience that enhances knowledge, understanding and appreciation of biomedical research. To bring equity and opportunity to a diverse population of NYC students, we have partnered with the LifeSci NYC initiative (https://lifesci.nyc) to involve more students from underrepresented communities into our program. This summer, we hosted 13 CUNY students who joined the Department of Medicine through LifeSci, 6 students who worked with the O’Brien Center, and 1 volunteer who joined the Division of Nephrology. In addition to working on diverse research projects, students participated in several activities that were designed to promote their personal and professional growths. Of these included:
- a bootcamp (organized by Dr. Milo Rasouly with talks from Dr. Milo Rasouly, Dr. Steers, Dr. Rubin, Dr. Xu and Dr. Verbitsky)
- an immunology workshop (Dr. Steers)
- a humane genetics workshop (Dr. Milo Rasouly)
- a final symposium where students presented the projects that they worked on throughout the summer
LifeSci students:
Afaf Ulay (Mentor: Dr. Jianlong Wang)“Using a degron system to investigate the eIF4A1 and eIF4A2 functions in the naive and primed pluripotent states”
Amena Shamia (Mentor: Dr. Xueling Wu)
“Identification of antibodies that potently neutralize HIV”
Arjun Dibya (Mentor: Dr. Jianwen Que)
“Investigate the function of ADRB2 in small cell lung cancer”
Daniel Hanuska (Mentor: Dr. Yiming Luo)
“Coronary artery calcification progression in systemic sclerosis: a study on clinical features”
Elina Shakur (Mentor: Dr. Matthew Yousefzadeh)
“Creating a new mouse model to study accelerated aging”
Elisha Jean (Mentor: Dr. Dympna Gallagher)
“Utilizing dual energy X-ray and doubly labeled water methods for quantifying energy intake”
Jianhua (Michael) Zen (Mentor: Dr. John Murray)
“Microscopy imaging analysis and bioinformatics”
Parneet Kaur (Mentor: Dr. Zizhang Sheng)
“Assembly of a curated antibody repertoire database to study human immune response”
Sabrina Jerezca (Mentor: Dr. Brooke Aggarwal)
“Examining the impact of REST program on enhancing sleep quality in early teenagers”
Thomas Klinger (Mentor: Dr. Matthew Yousefzadeh)
“Measuring biomarkers of cellular senescence in clinical specimens”
Yashawi Manneru (Mentor: Dr. Gulam Manji)
“Validating the presence of the KRAS mutation in patient derived tumor organoid (PDTO)”
Yonesy-Ryan Nunez (Mentor: Dr. Elizabeth Park)
“Analysis of methotrexate exposure and interstitial lung disease occurrence in rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis patient”
Wesam Bahrawi (Mentor: Dr. Nathalie Moise)
“How do exercise willingness, anxiety and depression interact in heart disease patients?
O’Brien Center students:
Amir Yaghoobi (Mentors: Sarath Babu Krishna-Murthy, Dr. Hila Milo Rasouly)“CRAFTS-indel: A novel approach to assess the frequency of small insertions and deletions in the UK Biobank Cohort”
Aryan Ghotra (Mentor: Dr. Jonathan Barasch)
“Hematuria regulates urothelial response to UTI”
Hanna Pawela (Mentor: Dr. Nick Steers)
“Alterations in the lymphocyte populations in kidney and bladders of HIV-1 transgenic mice”
Joshua Oken (Mentor: Dr. Kolupaeva)
“Strategies to increase patient participant response rate in RenaCARE study”
Mahirah Islam Khan (Mentors: Sarath Babu Krishna-Murthy, Dr. Hila Milo Rasouly)
“Adaptation of an English genetic literacy rapid test to Spanish”
Massimo Ferrari (Mentor: Dr. Simone Sanna-Cherchi)
“Contributions of rare copy number variation (CNV) to nephrotic syndrome”
Volunteer:
Ofek Harnof (Mentor: Dr. Hila Milo Rasouly)“Identifying biases in nephrologists’ referral of patients to genetic testing following kidney biopsy”