People

Bridget A. Wall Doctoral Student, Department of Biological Engineering Email: CV Joined the Lab: Fall 2008 Education B.A. in Biology and Music, Illinois Wesleyan University, 2008

Research Summary

Within biology and especially within the realm of Plasmodium biology, there is much still left to be discovered about the basic biochemical and molecular interactions that occur in cells. These basic interactions determine whether any number of outcomes will occur: growth, death, suicide, movement, production of exogenous factors, etc... In essence, these interactions allow for the biology of that particular organism to take place. Therefore, it’s crucial to investigate these processes:  what are these specific interactions?  Where do they occur in the cell? What is the time scale on which they occur? Finally, how do they mediate a given biological outcome? This currently unknown knowledge is crucial to develop a more complete picture of the biology of the parasite. To accomplish this goal, I am developing biomolecular tools to assist in the investigations of these important cellular interactions in vivo.

About Me

I hail from St. Paul, Minnesota, home of Paul Bunyan's paramour Lucette, the aptly-named and always delicious Minnesota State Fair, and the hammock currently living on the shores of one of Minnesota’s 11,482 lakes. As the daughter of two teachers, my childhood was spent reading about everything and anything, doing lots of science experiments, and asking questions about the world around me. After spending the summer at MIT as an NSF REU Student, I fell in love with both the collaborative nature of the people here as well as the incredible quality of the science…it helped me decide that scientific research was something that I wanted to pursue. After graduate school, I am interested in pursuing science communication to the public and science education. As such, I have been involved at MIT as both a teaching assistant, participant in the science policy bootcamp run by the head of MIT’s office in Washington DC, and as a summer teacher for the Harvard-MIT Educational Studies Program. When I’m not in the lab, I enjoy cooking, reading, and traversing Boston to find the next best thrift store.