Although my research experiences were predominantly scientific in nature, my global health coursework constantly helped me ground the work I was doing in the real world and the improvement of health of real people. When I was studying sarcoidosis in the Benos lab or breast cancer in the Sant Lab, my global health coursework reminded me of the socioeconomic factors that influence the development of disease. As a researcher in the Wright lab, the work I do understanding how bacteria communicate and grow could help us eventually develop new antibiotic products or understand antibiotic resistance better, which is a serious public health problem. I hope to use the research and analytical skills I’ve developed in my research experiences in the future as a public health professional.
Nithya Narayanan
Global Studies Center - University of Pittsburgh
Research
Research Projects
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I worked at the Benos Lab in the Department of Computational Biology in the spring semester of 2017. Sarcoidosis is the growth of tiny collections of inflammatory cells (granulomas) in different parts of your body — most commonly the lungs. The Benos Lab had extensive –omics and clinical data collected from sarcoidosis patients, I looked to better delineate the differences between the eight different stages of sarcoidosis. I have used Matlab scripts to clean the clinical dataset, by eliminating variables with large number of missing values and to cluster together highly correlated variables and performed principal component analysis (PCA) with the gene expression data to see if any specific patterns emerge that will point to data biases. This work was presented at the Spring 2017 FER Celebration of Research.
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I worked in the Sant Lab in the Department of Pharmacy from the fall semester of 2017 through the fall semester of 2018. Early diagnosis and histological characteristics help manage and improve patient outcomes in breast cancer patients. The formation of microcalcifications, or insoluble calcium deposits, are one of these hallmarks. I characterized microcalcifications that formed on a breast-cancer mimetic scaffold previously developed in the lab and determined that these were chemically similar to the microcalcifications that formed in breast cancer tissues, allowing further study in the lab. I presented this work at the 2018 Biomedical Engineering conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
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I have worked at the Wright Lab in the Department of Biomedical Informatics since the spring semester of 2019. My first project involved helping create a mock community of soil bacteria to help optimize methods for bacterial identification. We later used this mock community to study intercellular bacterial communication. Understanding the inhibitory products these bacteria produce when grown in proximity to each other can help identify potential compounds for antibiotic development and could help elucidate the impact of the microbiome on human health.