Notes from the Lab: Meet ARAC's Summer Interns

Meet Grace and Hanna, Our Summer Interns in the Lab!

It’s been a busy summer here in the lab, and thanks to our two interns it has flown by! Hannah and Grace are GWU undergraduate students who took Dr. Price’s class last semester and decided they wanted first-hand experience working in his lab to learn more about antibiotic resistance. They have been taught dozens of lab techniques that are helping ARAC researchers on a number of research projects and experiments.

Hi, I’m is Grace. I am a Senior at The George Washington University majoring in Public Health with a double minor in Nutrition and Sustainability. I am from Lexington, KY, and decided to move to a big city for college to surround myself with like-minded, ambitious individuals. I aspire to be a pediatrician and will hopefully move back to Kentucky after I graduate to start my journey at medical school.

I met Dr. Price as my professor for a class this past spring semester. He is hands down one of my favorite professors. I was always happy to end my school week with his class. As the semester started to wind down, I didn't want to miss out on an opportunity to continue to work with him. So I emailed him about a research opportunity, and he replied that he had a study of his own that he would need a few interns for. The rest is history. I have enjoyed my time working with him and his team (shout out to Remy, Kelsey, and Pei-Ying). Everyone has been incredibly nice and welcoming to Hanna and I as the newbies. For the first month, we learned about the workflow of the lab, mastered pipetting and streaking on plates, and had the opportunity to create the protocol for our study. Currently, we are doing test trials with the bacteria to ensure that our protocol works for when we actually conduct the study. I am very honored that I have been given this opportunity to work in the Price-Lui Lab! It's been an amazing experience!

Hi, I'm Hanna, and I'm a Junior majoring in Public Health with minors in Psychology and Chemistry. I grew up in suburban Bergen County, NJ, where I dreamed of pursuing medicine in the Big Apple that lay a half hour's drive from my front door. Although I intend to return to New York eventually, I am thoroughly enjoying my time in Washington, D.C., in no small part due to the richness of opportunity available by virtue of studying in the nation's capital.

I owe my involvement with ARAC to the lucky happenstance of registering for the section of Health and Environment that Dr. Price happened to teach. I'd always enjoyed the sciences, but had never pictured myself in a laboratory setting until I was swept up by Dr. Price's impassioned tales of culturing plates upon plates of bacteria during his early career. He spoke of antibiotic resistance with such a sense of urgency that I felt compelled to become more involved; thus, here I am. Since joining the lab, I've been able to observe and receive training in various technical skill sets, particularly in the bacterial culturing methods that first enthralled me. Having lent a hand in shaping the protocols for ARAC's imminent California Foodborne Urinary Tract Infections project, it has also been immensely rewarding participating in the project's pilot trial and seeing our work being put into action. I cannot wait to see what ARAC has in store for the future.