May 28, 2008
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| Laura Dickson has received a Fulbright grant to do research in Kenya. (Photos by Kathy Keatley Garvey) |
DAVIS—Her passion for global health, her dedication to science and her commitment to humanitarianism has led to a 10-month Fulbright grant in Kenya for a University of California, Davis student.
And it all began in childhood with a fascination for Africa and its culture, and later with helping AIDS patients in Ghana.
Laura Dickson, a malaria researcher in Shirley Luckhart’s lab and a senior majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology with a minor in global and international studies, leaves in August for Kisumu, western Kenya, where she will combine her interests in combating AIDS and malaria.
“I will be screening previously collected blood smears from patients co-infected with HIV and malaria to see if these co-infected individuals are more able to spread the malaria parasite to mosquitoes, which in turn would increase the spread of malaria,” Dickson said.
Technically, she will be screening blood samples for gametocytes by reading blood smears and by subjecting some samples to PCR (a highly sensitive test for DNA).
A five-week humanitarian effort in Ghana in 2006 to care for HIV patients cemented her interest in helping the peoples of Africa.
“I saw and cared for some very sick people,” she said. “I saw the impact it had on their lives, the lives of their families, and how they were treated in the hospitals. This (experience) redirected my goals.”
Dickson said the Fulbright grant is “a dream come true.” She initially heard her project wasn’t funded; then received an email that the Fulbright program had received additional funding for Kenya. An official asked if she still wanted to go.
“Yes!” she said.
“I’ve always had a fascination with Africa and its culture,” Dickson said. “As a scientist hoping for a career focused around global health, I find it very important that scientists understand the people that they are trying to help in order for new methods to be effective, and to maintain local culture.”
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Shirley Luckhart |
Her work with Shirley Luckhart, an associate professor at the UC Davis School of Medicine and a graduate student advisor in the Department of Entomology, has involved looking at the effects of insulin on the mosquito lifespan.
“Laura is working on our NIH (National Institutes of Health)-funded project on insulin signaling regulation of mosquito lifespan and innate immunity to malaria parasite infection,” Luckhart said. “Specifically, Laura’s work has demonstrated that insulin signaling induces oxidative damage in the mosquito – we had previously shown that insulin-fed mosquitoes have a reduced lifespan relative to control mosquitoes. So, oxidative damage reduces lifespan – an observation that has been made in organisms from nematodes to humans.”
“This damage,” Luckhart said, “is reversed by an antioxidant that also reverses the reduction in lifespan by insulin, so we are beginning to get a cause-and-effect here.”
Luckhart said Dickson is “also attempting to discern whether the effects of this antioxidant also affect a cell signaling pathway downstream of insulin receptor activation. This is an important question because it gets at whether there are multiple effects of insulin signaling and antioxidant effects or whether all of the effects can be attributed to oxidative damage and its reversal.”
Dickson’s work in the Luckhart lab led to a first-place tie and a $150 prize in the recent UC Davis Entomology Graduate Student Association’s research poster competition for undergraduates. Dickson titled her poster: "Human Insulin, Aging and Malaria in a Vector Mosquito: the Roles of Oxidative Stress and Signaling.”
The UC Davis senior also works in the lab of John Hershey, professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular medicine. “My project there has been to determine how the phosphorylation status of two protein translation initiation factors affects their interaction,” she said.
Concerned about the spread of AIDS, Dickson is active in Students Teaching AIDS to Students (STATS), a youth education and health prevention program sponsored by the American Medical Student Association. She and other UC Davis students give presentations at area high schools about the disease and how to prevent it. They offer facts about HIV and dispel myths.
Dickson’s future plans include pursuing graduate work in a global health-related field. Meanwhile, she’ll continue working in the Luckhart and Hershey labs.
A 2004 graduate of Oak Ridge High School, El Dorado Hills, Dickson comes from a supportive family. Her father, Ron, is a manager for an information technology consulting firm, and her mother, Cindy, is a cancer registrar at Sacramento area hospitals. Laura’s older sister, Karen, a 2006 graduate of Seattle Pacific University, will study pharmacy this fall at the University of Washington, and younger sister, Ellie, is a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara, where she is majoring in English and history.
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--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
