Gabriella Baraks
Graduate Student
Gabriella is a biomedical engineering student in the BE/MS accelerated program at Stony Brook University. She joined the laboratory in October 2019 as an undergraduate student. At that time, she worked alongside one of our graduate students, Chun Hao Pan, to identify a therapeutic opportunity that could overcome chemoresistance in cancer by testing drugs to determine specificity for K17 expressing pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. She received the SASS Foundation Award for Medical Research to continue her work during the summer of 2020, where she worked with other lab members to write a review paper as the first author (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34921015/). The paper reports on the oncogenic mechanisms of keratin 17 as they relate to each of the hallmarks of cancer.
Currently, in her final year as a master's student, Gabriella is creating a working pipeline whereby samples stained via immunohistochemistry can be laser micro dissected for downstream proteomic analysis. Specifically, she is characterizing proteins that are either significantly upregulated or downregulated in relation to Keratin 17 expression levels. Upon graduation, she hopes to continue working in the scientific field in the medical device industry.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34921015/
