Rockwood Students Contribute to Research Presented at Saint Louis University Symposium

Rockwood School District seniors Aditi Roy, Shruthi Senthil, Prabhjas Singh and Vignesh Viswananthan all contributed to research projects that were presented at the Saint Louis University Institute for Drug and Biotherapeutic Innovation (IDBI) Research Symposium on Sept. 18.

Roy presented at the symposium, while Senthil, Singh and Viswanathan’s work was represented by colleagues in the labs where they spent their summer.

Singh worked in the lab of Dr. Natasha Case, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, Senthil and Viswanathan worked with assistant professor of pharmacology and physiology Dr. Vincenza Cifarelli, and Roy worked in the lab of Dr. Koyal Garg, associate professor of biomedical engineering.

All four Rockwood students earned this opportunity through the PIE Summer Internship program, which provides students with career exploration opportunities going into their senior year of high school, allowing them to gain practical, real-world experience by partnering with professionals.

“PIE and (internship program managers Dixie Baker and Sean Biehle), none of this could have happened without them finding these opportunities for students,” Senthil said. “The number of things I’ve learned and grown from this summer is a huge tribute to them. I don’t think I would have been able to do all that I’ve done without them finding this for me and helping me grow and learn and navigate that professional environment.”

Learn more about the real-world research these outstanding Rockwood students conducted this summer.

Aditi Roy, Lafayette High

Paper Title: Developing Gelatin Hydrogels with Aligned Geometry to Mimic Musculoskeletal Architecture to Treat Volumetric Muscle Loss Injuries

What made you want to pursue this opportunity?
“I’ve always been interested in medicine. I knew at a young age that I wanted to be a doctor. I’ve always also loved science and math. Not only did I want to explore the clinical side, I never really got the experience to do research. With the PIE internship program, I wanted to explore what the medical research side of medicine was.”

What did your research involve?
“My goal was to create a hydrogel as a form of treatment for patients who suffer volumetric muscle loss, which is an injury where more than 20 percent of their muscle tissue is damaged. The special part of their treatment was that it was aligned, so the fiber networks within the gelatin were aligned. Our own musculoskeletal system has aligned fibers and, when patients suffer volumetric muscle loss, they often get fibrotic scar tissue that is not aligned. So while their volume comes back, the function of their muscles does not. The purpose of the gelatin treatment was to try to get back that framework that was originally there and get back that movement that was lost.”

What was the most impactful part of your experience?
“I got to present my research and findings to my own lab, then to Ms. Baker, then at the SLU IDBI Symposium with undergrad, grad, postdoc researchers and a few other high school students. It was a really fun experience. Seeing that many students there interested in research made me want to pursue more research. It showed me how much is available in the field of medicine, and it was such a great experience that it made me want to go to SLU to pursue my future majors.”

How do you hope to use this experience moving forward?
“Being able to do this internship made me want to pursue research more. I want to pursue a degree in medicine, but I also want to pursue an MD/PhD now because I loved the research experience so much. While I want to do medicine, I also want to do more into research, hopefully in biomedical engineering.”

Shruthi Senthil and Vignesh Viswanathan, Lafayette High
Paper Title: Integrated proteomics and in silico perturbation reveal a CD36–NOTCH1 axis linking fatty acids to lymphatic dysfunction in obesity

What made you want to pursue this opportunity?
SS: “I’ve taken all these classes in high school where I’ve learned about these concepts out of a textbook, but the idea of getting to see it in application in a lab was an opportunity I hadn’t yet pursued. What was particularly interesting to me about my experience was one of my big passions is women’s health, women’s equity, women’s empowerment, and the lab I researched at was studying a woman-centered chronic disease called lipedema. As a whole, it complemented a lot of the things I find interesting anyway.”

VV: “My passion is to become a cardiothoracic surgeon. I’ve been oriented toward that since freshman year and didn’t have any Plan B. I thought I could try going into medical research or something else and wanted to give it a shot.”

What was the most impactful part of your experience?

SS: “The whole lab was very supportive of one another. We all helped each other and were in the know about what everyone was doing, and that was something I really enjoyed. In terms of the science, and I’m glad I learned this now, sometimes you can do everything that you think is correct, and science will inevitably tell its own story. If you try to force the narrative you’ve predicted, you’re not going to move anywhere. As a student, I’ve generally had the experience that if I put in enough work, I’ll get the results I want to see. This was contradictory to that. I had to try to look for something else and pivot to new things.”

VV: “I have always been someone who likes to find the engine behind the problem, the why behind the what. Once I did this internship, I felt like there was another plan I could get into with research. If I decide that I’m not really into med school, I can get a PhD and become a professor, have my own lab. I got to see every single step in becoming a researcher. That played a big role because I like to see exactly how to get to the end goal of what career path I’d be in.”

How do you hope to use this experience moving forward?
SS: “One of the big things I walked away with this summer is learning about lipedema and how it is overlooked in many different facets. Patients will often just get diagnosed with obesity because we don’t have any sort of true biomarkers or way besides symptoms to diagnose these individuals. Another huge effect of having this condition is pain, so these patients are often suffering and being told that they are just overweight and need to mitigate that. That sense of responsibility to help these people is something I’ll carry forward. I’m very sure there are many more conditions like this out there – especially in the field of women’s health – and I hope to one day explore all of them, if possible. This was my stepping stone, and it made me interested in all that is possible to attain in this field that is very overlooked and under-represented.”

VV: “It showed me another path I could get into. In college, I’m definitely going to go into another lab for extra experience. Being in this lab in high school is going to give me experience and leverage to get into another lab position. I’m also already going to know some of the procedures and lab knowledge that I’m going to need to know, or the experimental process itself. I feel like my knowledge on that has expanded a lot in the past three months.”

Prabhjas Singh, Marquette High

Paper Title: Effect of Ionic Environment on κ-Carrageenan Hydrogel Stability

What made you want to pursue this opportunity?
“Most of my earlier research had been computational, and I wanted real wet lab experience: actually running experiments, handling cells, working with instruments. That's a different skill set from working with data, and I knew I needed it. The other piece was shadowing Dr. Dara in nephrology. Sitting in on those conversations – especially the hard ones – is something you don't forget, and it kept raising a question for me. Where does the knowledge behind those conversations actually come from? How do we know what we know about the body, and who figures that out? Research was how I could start to answer that.”

What did your research involve?
“The lab studies how the materials used in joint replacements interact with bone cells when the chemistry around them changes, and a lot of that work uses MG-63 bone cells on UHMWPE, the plastic in artificial joints. My piece of it was building and testing k-carrageenan hydrogels across different ionic conditions and using spectrophotometry to see how they responded. The idea was to characterize the gels so they could support Dr. Case's MG-63 work down the line. The bigger question the lab is chasing is why some implants hold up for decades and others don't, and what's happening at the interface between the material and the bone that decides which way it goes.”

How do you hope to use this experience moving forward?
“I'm applying to medical programs this fall, and I want to keep doing research through college and beyond. What this summer really clarified was how slow and specific good research actually is. Nothing about it is fast, and a lot of it is just getting the method right before you can even ask the question. I'd like to find a lab in college that sits somewhere between materials, biology and clinical questions. Long-term, I want to be a doctor who can read the literature critically and add to it, not just work from it.”