This summer we’re sponsoring high school interns in stem cell labs throughout California. We asked those students to contribute to our Instagram photos and YouTube videos about life in the lab, and write about their experiences.

Christina Ren is a junior at Monte Vista High School in Danville, California. She works in the lab of Dr. Ching-Cheng Chen in the Department of Stem Cell and Leukemia. Her current project at the City of Hope aims to study the impact of leukemia cells and leukemia-derived exosomes on stroma cell differentiation and its chemoprotective effect on leukemia cells. In addition to my interest in science research, she also founded a science community service mentoring program called Science Alliance Network which aims to help foster school clubs to pair elementary and middle school “buddies” with high school mentors to help these buddies on their science fair project. Christina also enjoys extracurricular activities, such as ballet, Chinese classical dance, flute, and swimming.

The City of Hope high school summer interns submitted this photo to our #CIRMStemCellLab Instagram feed.

Every day during my walk over to the cafeteria at the City of Hope, I witness my inspiration: a small patient room protruding from the elegant glass buildings of the Helford Hospital. Through the windows, I see a collage of photos plastered on the opposite wall, covering the entire surface of the pinboard like a monolayer of cells on a petri dish. Sometimes I stop and squint to see if I can make out the individual photos; they are all of people. Some are of patients out abroad traveling to scenic places, some of nurses and their fellow coworkers. There are also frequently patients in there, hooked up to expensive-looking machinery. One elderly woman wearing a soft, floral lavender headscarf was reading The Fault of Our Stars (I remember covers of books that I’ve read very well, and I recognized the blue, cloud shaped cover design instantly). Another young chap was chattering away with a caretaker the next day.

This moving sight stirs within me deep emotions of empathy, compassion, and motivation. It’s a daily, tangible reminder of who research ultimately helps: real people. City of Hope’s patient-centered philosophy is present at every corner I turn– a gate towards the front end of the campus writes, “There is no profit in curing the body if in the process we destroy the soul”. I attended a seminar talk from an associate professor entitled, “Neural Stem Cell-Mediated Cancer Therapy: From Bench to Bedside” where Professor Aboody talked on her research on neural stem cells for targeted drug delivery. I am reinvigorated each time I walk under the Mary Ann and Dave Brooks Bridge of Healing after lunch.

Though I do not attempt to glorify the drudgery of research at times, I am always honored to be a gear in this intricate clockwork striving towards scientific progress. Because I know, while looking through the window panes of that singular patient room, that research for the betterment of humanity is forever beautiful and sacred. Thank you, CIRM, for giving me this wonderful opportunity to work at City of Hope.

Christina Ren

This summer we’re sponsoring high school interns in stem cell labs throughout California. We asked those students to contribute to our Instagram photos and YouTube videos about life in the lab, and write about their experiences.

Michelle Tran is an incoming senior at the Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach. From a young age, she always had a great fascination for the natural sciences, spending hours out in the neighborhood collecting and analyzing plant and insect specimens out of scientific curiosity. More recently her interest has shifted more towards health and biomedical research and was able to pursue this at City of Hope this summer as an intern in the Department of Information Sciences. Outside of scientific research, she enjoys playing the cello, spending time on the tennis courts with her father, stand-up paddle boarding with her mother, traveling, biking with friends, and hiking.

Michelle sent us this video of her experience:

As of now, halfway through my summer internship, I can declare with great certainty that I have already learned much more than I had expected to learn over the entire summer. Before starting my internship at the City of Hope, my experience with computer programming was limited. I had always been interested with working with computers, but had never taken a formal school or online course in programming. On the first day of work, my mentor, a mathematician and scientific programmer, informed me that I would be working extensively with machine learning, Hugin (a software), and R (a statistical programming language) to mathematically model biological processes. Initially I was unsure if I would be able to work with these tools or even understand the technical language everyone in my department spoke, but now, a little over five weeks later, my aforementioned apprehensions are no longer concerns. I am now editing and running several modeling and machine learning programs in R every day.

Every day since my first here at City of Hope has been part of a great, long learning process. Not only have I become more comfortable working with machine learning and computer programming this summer, I have also gained valuable career insight from everyone around me. Although I did not fully realize or appreciate all I have gathered from others, I now look back to my interactions with people here and realized that I have absorbed valuable information and skills that I could have not gotten elsewhere. Over the last few weeks, I have received great exposure to the technical languages that biologists and computer scientists speak and am able to quickly follow their discussions of their thought processes and methodologies. I have also learned much about communicating scientific results efficiently and effectively to others, especially from my fellow summer academy students who did such great jobs presenting at our weekly discussions. Every researcher and practitioner who I have talked to here has given me wonderful life advice about keeping an open mind to learning new things or pursuing other fields.

Working in my lab at the City of Hope this summer has been an experience that I shall always look back on fondly. No matter where I will be ten years from now, the knowledge I have gained from everyone here at City of Hope will still remain with me.

Michelle Tran