June 22, 2016, Filed Under: 2016, cancer, reflections, research, texas4000Cancer Research Dedications Every week at our group meeting, we go around and volunteer “dedications” stating who we are dedicating this week of work to and offering a thank you to the people that made it possible. These dedications range from deeply emotional to practical to lighthearted, but their tone does not diminish their truthfulness. At least personally, a dedication to my coffee maker is as legitimate as one to my high school teachers as both are responsible for my ability to get up every morning and perform research. Dedications to grants and funding are popular as well, a pragmatic necessity to make any kind of scientific research comes to fruition in this day and age. These dedications could happen at any workplace – I’m sure dedications to coffeemakers happen worldwide – but ours are special. Same fight, different fronts. (Photo credit, top: Sydney Hutton; bottom: texas4000.org) Everyone who sits in that room, undergraduates, graduates and investigators alike, is dedicated to a common goal, curing cancer. Cancer is such a highly personal disease that I doubt that one person in that room does not think of a particular person in their life when they walk into lab. Maybe it was a relative who struggled with cancer, a beloved teacher or friend. And even if he or she has not had a felt the influence of cancer strongly, human compassion links everyone emotionally in the fight for a cure. No one feels the weight of these dedications more than the Texas 4000 riders who have recently embarked on grueling physical journey to raise awareness and funds for cancer research. Their persistence and ability to push themselves mentally and physically to complete a ride to Alaska is awe-inspiring. Every steep uphill or cramped muscle is weathered by personal endurance, willpower and a supportive community joined in the fight. And this week I offer my appreciation and thanks to the whole-hearted dedication of the Texas 4000 riders who spend their summer biking as a physical manifestation of thousands of years of suffering by cancer victims and hundreds of years of research by doctors and scientists to find treatments. This week as I enter the lab I am going to attempt to embody their determination and perseverance as I learn from my mentors and perform my own research. I hope that through very different yet parallel journeys this summer, we can spark awareness, compassion, unity and innovation. Sydney Hutton, Stanford University
June 21, 2016, Filed Under: 2016, cancer, research, texas4000Letter to Texas 4000 Rider: Jacob Lozano Dear Jacob, Hello, my name is Daniel Chavarria. I am a current student at the University of Texas at El Paso but I’m spending my summer at UT Austin as part of the BME CUReS Cancer REU. Coming into the program I thought I had an idea of what cancer was. I know the biological factors and aspects of cancer, the limitations of its treatments, the side effects of the chemotherapies and how each day we are making more and more progress in the fight against cancer. But I had completely neglected one aspect of cancer, the people it affects. Daniel Chavarria in front of Littlefield fountain at UT Hearing about your story and how it has affected not only your family but the family of your close friend has really put things into perspective. I have been blessed that no one close to me has been diagnosed with cancer, I consider myself lucky. You have demonstrated a great deal of courage and determination. I know it’s extremely hard losing a loved one at such a young age. Just like you, my grandmother passed away from idiopathic cardiomegaly when I was eight years old. Things are never the same when you lose a loved one. That is why I admire your drive and boldness as you take on your ride. As you set forth in your route I too will be making a journey of my own, immersing myself in a research intensive summer program that hopes to contribute to the fight against cancer from a biomedical engineering standpoint. Although I may work many hours and may never see results of my work here at UT Austin I am sure of one thing. Thanks to you I have found one more reason as to why I want to pursue a career in research. Sincerely, Daniel Chavarria, UTEP Jacob Lozano is a UT Austin Senior in Biology and currently riding to Alaska on the Rockies team.
August 6, 2015, Filed Under: 2015, austin, fun, texas4000, ut austinLetter to Texas 4000 Rider: Alexander Zwaan Dear Alexander, Hello. My name is Sean Thomas, and I am part of the BME CUReS Cancer REU at UT this summer. My research is on lipid membranes, which are similar to cells, except that they don’t have organelles or proteins. The work of Dr. Stachowiak’s lab may eventually lead to lipid membranes with enclosed cancer drugs delivering drugs specifically to cancer cells, leaving other cells untouched by their toxic payload. I picked you as my letter recipient first because you were on the Ozarks route, and we in the REU have not had any mass interactions with your team yet, and second, because as someone with the last name Thomas, I commiserate with everyone whose last name is at the end of the alphabet. That being said, this letter goes out not only to you but to the whole Ozarks team and all of the Texas 4000 Riders. When I was applying to REUs, I honestly l thought to myself “Wow! 10 weeks?! That is a lot of my summer. I could be spending that time with my friends.” Of course, I knew there was only going to be 7-9 other people in my REU with me, but who knew if I’d get along well with any of them. Certainly not as well as with my established friends, right? Well, after nine and a half weeks in Austin, I want more, and it has nothing to do with me not wanting to go back to school. 10 weeks was not enough. The friends I made here have been great, and I am definitely not ready to close the books on my research. In fact, I will very likely be taking it back to the lab I work in at the University of South Carolina. But mostly because of my friends here. And I have done 100 times more with them then I could have hoped to do with my friends back home. Credit: Sean Thomas I am sure you—if not Alexander, then at least some of you—felt the same way. 10 weeks of biking day-in and day-out is daunting. There is definitely an opportunity cost associated with it. But I bet you guys bonded with your squad like nobody’s business. Not to mention that in both our cases we did work that was beyond worth doing, whether raising money for cancer research or performing it. For my photo this blog post, I looked through my phone for good pictures of our time here. The first one I found was one of us (below) in front of the Tower taking after we went to an 18+ club and Kerbey Lane at about 2:30 AM on our friend whom we adopted from another REU, Justin’s last night. As I went deeper into my photos and earlier into the summer, I found another photo of the Tower (above) with nothing in the foreground but a statue taken on our first weekend excursion, when we explored the Dobie in the morning and the Capitol in the afternoon. Photo credit to Stefani Maris (it was on her phone), Ryan Miller (he snapped it), and Priscilla Castillo (she edited it) These pictures are perfect for framing the REU: a picture of the Tower in the morning, taken at the dawn of our REU and a picture of the same Tower in the waning hours of both the night and the REU, with a new morning about to dawn. The foreground of the first contains a lone statue of horse and rider. It is a picture from the REU students’ and the riders’ shared time in Austin, and even the horse is fitting, as in its infancy, the bicycle was known as a hobby horse. We came in riding alone, but that quickly changed as we picked up your program’s idea of dedicated one’s week of labor to others. The foreground of the second is even more fitting, as now, the lone rider has been replaced by a group of friends. Now, as we ride out of Austin, we won’t be riding alone. -Sean Thomas, Univ of South Carolina Alexander Swaan is a UT Austin International Relations senior and a member of the Ozarks Team!
