Posters plastering the room, a persistent, vivacious chatter — at the March New England Science Symposium, what might have seemed like a tornado of unrelated ideas and academic entropy were actually connected by one common theme: to use scientific research to make a difference in the world.
The New England Science Symposium is an annual forum for students across the U.S. to present their research about biomedical and health research.
This year’s symposium, held March 28, featured Fatima Cody Stanford, associate professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, as keynote speaker.
During the symposium, researchers presented on a variety of topics, ranging from transmon qubits to targeted protein degradation.
A qubit is a unit that stores information in its quantum states. Unlike other qubits, transmon qubits are less sensitive to noise from its surroundings, making them useful for quantum computers.
Presenters said they wanted their innovations to make a difference in the world, be it in quantum computing or in finding a cure to diabetes.
Lia Ecker, a post-baccalaureate research intern at Novartis, said she develops targeted protein degradation, which modifies cells’ waste disposal systems to “drug the undruggable.”
Some proteins, she said, are associated with diseases. By sending small molecules to modify a cell’s surface, scientists can “hijack the cell’s natural systems for taking out the trash” to target those diseases.
She said her current research focuses on targeting procaspace-2, a protein involved in cellular death.
“[By] just understanding the space and how good we are at getting rid of it, maybe that will then influence finding other targets,” Ecker said. “Now you could target something completely different.”
Ananya Chattaraj, a postdoctoral researcher in material science at Brookhaven National Laboratory, said her research focused on protecting transmon qubits, a technology necessary for quantum computing.
The materials used to make transmon qubits are often extremely sensitive to oxygen, Chattaraj said. By making specialized layers that protect the qubits, they can be more ready for human use.
This research, Chattaraj said, would help innovators advance and build large scale quantum computers, which can be used in fields such as cancer therapy.
“This kind of complex problem, [the] classical computer [isn’t going] be able to solve,” Chattaraj said. “In that case, the quantum computer [can come] into the picture.”
Other researchers are driven by more personal connections to what they study.
Sergio Vazquez, a research assistant at the Joslin Diabetes Center and medical student at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, said he researched senescent cell surface markers in the pancreas.
When healthy cells get damaged beyond repair, they usually self-destruct in a process called apoptosis. But some of those cells become senescent cells, meaning that they cannot fix themselves or die off.
Instead, they’re “just taking up space in the pancreas,” Vazquez said. That development can cause type two diabetes.
His research, he said, is focused on finding a marker on these cells so that researchers can easily identify them, with the eventual goal of clearing them to reverse type two diabetes.
He was motivated to research this topic, he said, because of his family and community history.
“Type two diabetes runs in my family, and it’s also really common in my community, especially in Latino communities across the country,” Vazquez said. “That’s what brought me to it.”
Vazquez said he aims to use his work to better understand type two diabetes.
“The way we treat type two diabetes in this country at the moment, it’s focused around the symptoms,” Vazquez said. “I got really interested with this research because it’s essentially trying to reverse its progression.”