Anika Porwal is an undergraduate senior at Stony Brook University majoring in Biology and minoring in Spanish. She aspires to start medical school in the fall of 2023. She joined the lab in September of 2021, working heavily with immunofluorescence and immunohistochemistry techniques for various cancers. She piloted a project with the team to understand the role of the epithelial to mesenchymal transition in pancreatic adenocarcinoma progression by looking at the co-expression of the transcription factor Zeb-1 and Keratin 17.  She has continued her interests in translational cancer research through projects in understanding K17’s modulation of the tumor immune microenvironment in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and pipeline development for computational reconstruction of cancer tissue. As part of her time in the lab she presented her work at the American Society for Investigative Pathology’s national conference, Stony Brook University’s URECA and at Stony Brook’s Cancer Center Research Retreat where she was awarded the Outstanding Poster Award. She has also joined the team in attending the American Association for Cancer Research‘s Pancreatic Cancer special conference.