I am a high school Chemistry and Earth & Environmental Science teacher at Johnston County Middle College High School where I’ve taught for seven years.  I am about to start my 20th year teaching, having previously taught for twelve years at Myers Park High School in Charlotte.

I’ve taught in Ohio and Indiana, taught for public schools, taught for private schools (during the summer), taught for Duke TIP (Intro to Western Philosophy), and Science in the Summer (through the Morehead Planetarium and GlaxoSmithKline).

I say all of that just to emphasize that I have had a lot of diverse teaching experiences, but what I didn’t have was much practical hands-on lab experience (and certainly very little recently).  That has all changed this year with my Kenan Fellowship externship.  The project that I am working on is titled “Reinvigorating the War Against Cancer” and it is cooperation with Dr. David Muddiman and his team working out of the W.M. Keck Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at N.C. State.

Dr. Muddiman actually has several teams of graduate students and post-docs working on several different projects.  The team that I am working on is helping to investigate the use of glycans as possible biomarkers in the diagnosis of ovarian cancer.  They are working in coordinated efforts with synthetic chemists, molecular biologists, biochemists, animal scientists, and oncologists on this project.

Glycans are sugar molecules that have bonded to something else in the body (usually proteins or lipids) and they play really important roles in cell development and communication.  The primary process that they are involved in is called glycosylation (glycation involves them as well, but is a random process and, generally-speaking, not a positive one).  Glycomics is the attempt to map glycans to see what their roles are in living systems (just like genomics (genome mapping) did for genes/DNA and proteomics is doing for proteins).

Glycans can be difficult to measure because they are highly soluble and therefore difficult to separate.  Mass spectrometers, the major analytical tool of this lab, can separate them based on their different masses, but in order for that to work they have to form ions (which they do not do readily).  The team I am working on is trying to test (and suggest the synthesis of) different tagging reagents that can be used with the glycans (a process called derivatization) to make them easier to measure.

Ultimately these reagents will help us test for glycans in hen sera.  Chickens are the only species used as an animal model in ovarian cancer studies because they are one of the few other organisms that spontaneously develop the disease.  Longitudinal studies of chickens (because the glycans vary from one individual to another, so they need to be tracked within individuals over time) and their glycans are being conducted to see if, indeed, there are some potential glycan biomarkers.

This is important work.  Imaging tests are generally inconclusive with ovarian cancer and there are no generally accepted clinical tests that can be used to diagnose it (at least in the early stages).  Between 70-80% of the women that are diagnosed with ovarian cancer are already in late-stages.  This late diagnosis drastically reduces the chances of patient survival beyond five years.

I feel honored and privileged to be part of such important work, and it has been an inspiring experience to be back in the lab and surrounded by scientists.  I hope to bring my excitement and experiences back to my students and school in a meaningful way.

Me and my mentor, Dr. David Muddiman