Biomedical Sciences

Research: Signaling proteins in cytokinesis

Socrates Project: Worms in the Classroom

Looking back on her own career in science, Lindsay Lewellyn can remember the exact moment when she began to realize “how cool science really is.”

“It was in middle school biology class,” she recalls, “when my teacher showed us some planaria and explained how you could cut them up into pieces, and each piece would regenerate to form a whole new animal. Although this was just a simple demonstration, Lindsay Lewellyn, Biological Sciences (Advisor Prof. Karen Oegema) About Socrates"Socrates taught me how to make science approachable to a broader scientific audience. It also challenged me to explain my own research in a way that non-scientists could understand. If you contemplate doing any teaching later on, this is a great way to learn it."it really opened up the class for discussion of many interesting topics that related to both basic biology as well as the relevance to health and disease.

She hopes to spark many such “a-ha” moments in the students she comes in contact with as a Socrates Fellow. “I’m excited about participating as a Fellow not only because quality science education can inspire and motivate future scientists, but the whole process of designing and executing experiments teaches students critical thinking skills -- important tools that will benefit them in any career they choose,” she says.

A fifth-year graduate student in UCSD’s Biomedical Sciences program, Lindsay received her B.S. degree in Biology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In her graduate work in the laboratory of Dr. Karen Oegema, she is using the newly fertilized one-cell embryo of the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, to study the role of different signaling proteins in cytokinesis. Cytokinesis, which is the final step of the cell cycle, must be coordinated both spatially and temporally with segregation of the chromosomes to ensure that each daughter cell gets a complete copy of the genome.