I was working as a veterinary technician in an animal hospital
and the chairperson for the chemistry department brought her dog in and I filled out her information.
I said Who’s the chemistry teacher? She said I am. And I said Oh, I always
loved the chemistry. And she said What about Hofstra? and one of the prerequisites
for the class, which was microbiology, and I fell in love with the microbiology and did
a research, a semester of research with her, and that started to open my eyes to it. Wow,
there’s other things in biology besides going and teaching in high school or becoming
a doctor. As a person, she taught me to follow my heart, that I have talents and abilities,
and my heart lies in veterinary medicine, and beginning to realize that just seeing
people with their dogs and their cats as a small animal veterinarian is not the only
option. When I went to the Galapagos, I was able to see how closely those human lives
overlap with the veterinarian, I’m pretty sure that there’s a contribution that I
can make somewhere in there, I just need to find it. The things that I found most rewarding
about this campus was their professors in any department. They want to see you get the
material. They want to see you understand it, they have a passion for whatever it is
that they are teaching, and they have a genuine concern, even for the student’s well being.
There are multiple focuses, multiple projects going on at the lab, in the lab at once. The
Willie lab focuses its research on a soil bacterium called striptomicesceliocore. Striptomices
is responsible for producing arithromicin, instreptomicin, common antibiotics used by
humans. Over the past year we’ve been searching for a potential signaling molecule responsible
for the cue of the microbes to start moving into making one of their biosurfactins. So
the research is oriented toward illucidating the pathway where the sap-e is produced, allowing
the spores to liberate themselves from the water, which is closely related to the antibiotic
production. If we could couple how to get this down, we might be able to remove the
lag time in being able to mass produce these antibiotics. My name is Stephanie Wells and
I got my B.S. in biology will a cell and molecular concentration.
