Joan

Joan
Raffles Institution
Singapore

Mentor:
Channing Yu
Associated Scientist

Aristotle Mannan
Research Associate

Joan has been fascinated by science since she was young — especially biology, which she thinks enables one to understand the mysteries of the human body and its interactions with the environment. Joan was interested in an internship at the Broad to immerse herself in an atmosphere fully supportive of scientific inquiry. She hoped to strengthen her interest in science and research by learning from experienced mentors. Her research project involved the screening of a diversity oriented synthesis compound — and its 70 analogs — against lung carcinoma cell lines. Through the use of PRISM (Profiling Relative Inhibition Simultaneously in Mixture), a novel method for high-throughput analysis of compounds across multiple cell lines, she hoped to determine the compound’s structural requirements of specificity in order to create a chemical probe that could be used as a tool for target deconvolution.

In the future, Joan is considering a career in medicine. This internship allowed her to undertake research in oncology, a field she had been interested in for a long time but never had the chance to gain first-hand experience with. She felt that her project was extremely eye opening and allowed her to further form connections between chemistry and biology.