Graduates of the sluglab have been moving on to amazing careers. So we were excited to get the news that lab alumni and neuroscience major Derek Stek has just been offered a full scholarship to attend medical school at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin. Woo hoo!
Derek spent the summer of 2017 working in the lab, and also did summer research programs at the University of Colorado (2016) and UCLA (2018). In the sluglab, Derek learned how to do extract RNA (which does *not* start by vortexing the DNA-ase) and conduct qPCR. He helped track the expression of several transcripts regulated after learning, and was a co-author on the lab’s most recent paper (Patel et al., 2018).
Derek was also a star outside of the classroom, playing a big part on the DU varsity basketball team. This year, as he finishes at DU, Derek has been working with children with autism and learning behavioral therapy.
Congrats, Derek!
- Patel, U., Perez, L., Farrell, S., Steck, D., Jacob, A., Rosiles, T., … Calin-Jageman, I. E. (2018). Transcriptional changes before and after forgetting of a long-term sensitization memory in Aplysia californica. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 474–485. doi:10.1016/j.nlm.2018.09.007