Stephanie Switalski

Class of 2019

Education: Blended BS and MS in Biomedical Engineering at Cal Poly

 

Biography

Stephanie is interested in regenerative medicine because it merges two of her passions: engineering and medicine. She likes the innovative nature and the possibility of treating a wide range of diseases. Stephanie wants to focus on bio-signaling pathways used in diseases and cancers. She thinks that understanding these pathways will lead to new treatments for illnesses that currently have no treatment or are poorly treated. After graduation, Stephanie hopes to go into industry in a research position and is open to the possibility of attaining a PhD in the future.

Stephanie is interning for Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Cell Biology Division, Carlsbad, under Uma Lakshmipathy. The lab is working on establishing workflows to streamline the Cell Therapy Characterization processes specifically involving stem cells and immune cells. Stephanie’s internship project focuses on comprehensive molecular characterization including immune repertoire, HLA types, genomic integrity and pluripotency of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) generated from a number of different sources. Leveraging high-resolution microarray and Next-Generation Sequencing this work investigates if differences in genetic makeup affects their ability to be reprogrammed and further downstream applications in cell therapy space.