Researcher of the Week: Sarah Pollock

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 12:14:36 -0400
biochemistry, biology, marc, molecular, scholar, u-star

Meet Sarah,

Sarah is a Biochemistry and Molecular Biology major as well as a MARC U*STAR Scholar. She is very interested in health policy and health disparities, and would like to get her Master's in Public Health before going to either medical school or graduate school (for a PhD in health and public policy). Sarah is also involved with the SUCCESS program and is the president of Retrievers for Animal Welfare and Sustainability. In her spare time, she is a campus organizer for The Humane League and help organize the annual Baltimore VegFest held on UMBC’s campus.

Sarah participated in a group research project that explored a system to evaluate a novel sensor employing innovative nanoreaction chamber technology, which will track transient biomolecular interactions in real time at a single molecule level. They evaluated this sensor by studying the interactions between the FK506-binding protein (FKBP) and the FKBP12-rapamycin binding (FRB) domain in the presence of various small molecules such as rapamycin. FKBP bound rapamycin forms complexes with the FRB domain of mTOR, which is an essential regulator of cell growth and survival.

Read more about Sarah’s research here...