The following comes from Julie Adams, who just finished her PhD in Microbiology.  Julie was an English and Biology double major while at Messiah.  She’s currently looking for a job where she can combine her expertise in microbiology and writing.  Many congratulations and best wishes to Julie.

After graduating from Messiah, I worked for Biosynexus, Inc. in Gaithersburg, MD. At Biosynexus, I joined the microbiology group where I helped to initiate a project investigating the establishment and eradication of Staphylococcus biofilms on medical implants. We were fortunate to have a publication (Wu JA, Kusuma C, Mond JJ, Kokai-Kun JF. “Lysostaphin disrupts Staphylococcus aureus and Staphylococcus epidermidis biofilms on artificial surfaces.” Antimicrobial Agents Chemother. 2003; 47:3407-3414) and a patent associated with that work.

I began my graduate education in the fall of 2002 in the Program for Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, MD (across the street from the main campus of the National Institutes of Health). USUHS was established as a military medical school (incidentally, the film “Fighting for Life” features three USUHS med students and was filmed at my school) and, in order to be an accredited medical school, started a small civilian graduate program (in the 80s, I believe) of which I am a part.

My thesis work was completed in the Pathology Department, and my research focused on reproductive immunology. During school, I was co-author on a publication (Ha CT, Waterhouse R, Wessells J, Wu JA, Dveksler GS. Binding of pregnancy-specific glycoprotein 17 to CD9 on macrophages induces secretion of IL-10, IL-6, PGE2, and TGF-beta1. J Leukoc Biol. 2005; 77: 948-957) and an abstract (Eddington DO, Cummings DM, Wu JA, Segars JH, Wu TJ. Sexual dimorphic distribution of the Dbl proto-oncogene Brx in the mouse brain and pituitary. Annual Meeting of the Endocrine Society 2003. Philadelphia, PA) and presented at the 2007 meeting for the American Society for Cell Biology. I will also be presenting at the upcoming meeting for the American Society for Reproductive Immunology in Chicago in June. The title of my dissertation is “Induction of pro-angiogenic factors by pregnancy-specific glycoproteins and studies on receptor usage,” which I successfully defended in April. I will be participating in the 2008 USUHS Commencement Ceremony and am this year’s recipient of the Board of Regents Award.

Posted on May 9th, 2008 by Peter Kerry Powers
Filed under: Uncategorized, Alumni news