Chelsea was born in Sterling, IL and moved to Walnut, IL in 6th grade, where she stayed throughout high school. They didn’t have enough people or resources to have their own high school, so all the middle schools within about a 30 mile radius are consolidated into one high school, Bureau Valley High School, in Manlius, IL, where she graduated with a class of 60 seniors.
Chelsea had an unusual research journey. Ever since she was young, she had been surrounded by family members and classmates with cancer. At first, her melodramatic middle school self thought that maybe she was cursed and disease would follow her and affect her loved ones for her whole life. In high school, a classmate died from a rare form of pediatric cancer, and at her memorial, she came to the realization that maybe she wasn’t cursed. Maybe she was meant to stop disease. In college, Chelsea started studying to become a doctor and began research to further her application to medical school. However, within the first few days in the Colgan, she was hooked. Fast forward a couple years, and now, Chelsea dreams of becoming a clinical researcher in epidemiology and infectious disease. She’s applying to graduate schools now and is very excited about having a career in research and helping others for the rest of her life.
- Chelsea is a part of three research groups: the Colgan Lab, the Neiman Lab, and the AIDS Quilt Touch Research Project.
- With the Colgan lab, she is researching GON4L, a very mysterious protein, and its roles in tumor progression. We have found that this particular protein has a role in post-transcriptional modification of histones, which may cause cells to ramp up grow tumors in certain types of cancer. The lab is also looking at T cell immunotherapy as a way to stop cancer growth. To do this, they focus on trying to control certain T cell receptors, and forcing them to attack tumors.
- In the Neiman Lab, Chelsea focuses on histones and what exactly they do. This lab uses a really unique, cool type of snail that can have varying numbers of copies of their chromosomes, and they found out that those snails have exponentially different amounts of histones, not the two or three fold difference you would expect. Chelsea is focused on figuring out why the snails have crazy chromosome copy numbers and if there is any rhyme or reason that decides how many they have.
- Her work on the AIDS Quilt Touch team is pretty straight forward. Chelsea focuses on creating health education materials to better educate people about HIV/AIDS to prevent further spread of the disease. HIV is very manageable now, so you don’t hear much about it, but it is actually still a huge health concern. The team is hoping that through better health education and displays of the beautiful AIDS quilt, they can limit future transmissions.
Gold S.T.A.R.S. 