Will Yuen
Please provide a brief summary of your research.
My focus was pre-clinical research concerning a promising potential therapeutic to alleviate Renal Ischemic Reperfusion Injury (IRI), an unavoidable injury in the organ transplant setting. There are currently no effective treatments for this inevitable injury. To do this my lab and I developed a novel in vitro cold hypoxia and reperfusion protocol to best model transplant related IRI in tubular epithelial cells (TECs), the main target of this type of injury. This involved subjecting TECs to 6h of cold hypoxia followed by a designated time of reperfusion (incubation in fresh media at 37C). My research confirmed that this model properly mimicked renal IRI in vitro by confirming the presence of inflammation, kidney injury, and cell death in TECs via qPCR, flow cytometry, and fluorescence staining assays across multiple time points (0h, 2h, 16h, and 24h of reperfusion) compared to control. I then investigated the effect of the potential therapeutic on these same factors. The therapeutic is an siRNA knockdown of XBP1, a vital transcription factor in the ER stress pathway that results in inflammation. Compared to non-transfected cells, TECs transfected with XBP1 siRNA displayed less inflammation, kidney injury, and cell death imaged/quantified via the same assays used previously. This emphasized that the knockdown of XBP1 in TECs is a promising potential therapeutic to alleviate IRI.
What made you initially interested in researching your project in particular?
I found it particularly compelling that this type of injury (IRI) is quite unavoidable during/after transplantation and that we somehow have not developed any effective solutions to this injury. Furthermore, renal IRI contributes to the development of acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD) down the road, which only further emphasizes the significance of this injury and the need to alleviate it.
What made you interested in pursuing (interdisciplinary) research more broadly?
I knew I wanted to do research during my time at Northwestern even before I got accepted here. Northwestern has a fantastic reputation as a top school for research and education and it’s extremely important to make sure to appreciate that and take advantage of the opportunities that are available to you here. You have the opportunity to work with and help the greatest minds of their field and be apart of something much bigger than yourself, your lab, and even Northwestern. That something is contributing to the advancement of knowledge of what you are studying and making a genuine difference in the world no matter how small. For me more specifically, contributing to the development of a possible therapeutic to an injury that currently has no effective treatment and the possibility that my work could actually make a difference in the field and eventually in the real world fills me with pride and appreciation for the opportunities I was given here.
Describe your experiences with research thus far. Was it tricky? What skills do you think you’ve gained?
My research experience has been extremely positive here at Northwestern. My first year summer I had an amazing experience working in the Social Cognition Lab under Dr. Bodenhausen and Jordan Daley (now Dr. Daley!) on the Skin Tone and Persuasion Study. Then, starting my second year summer I got involved in research regarding renal transplant at the Comprehensive Transplant Center in Feinberg, working under Dr. Zhang and I’ve been at said lab since. I’ve been very lucky with amazing, generous, and kind PI’s, post-docs, and grad students that I’ve worked with who genuinely cared about me and I hope that I have been able to help contribute to their projects and labs as much as possible. Through my experience I’ve learned the utmost significance of diversity of research and interdisciplinary experience. There are so many ways in which biology and psychology interact and when you engage in interdisciplinary study/research you can bring nuanced ideas to each subject from the other. Research has taught me and refined many important skills such as organization, time-management, problem solving, communication and collaboration with very different kinds of people, perseverance, grant/manuscript writing, ethical research practices, creativity, and scientific literacy in multiple different fields. I’d say the hardest part of research by far is troubleshooting when you experience a problem with a project.
Any tips or advice you have for students similar to you that are interested in pursuing undergraduate research?
Don’t be afraid to email your professors or reach out to any whose research interests you, that’s how I got all of my research experience. Make sure to find something you genuinely care about and grow that interest through contributing to research. Make sure to appreciate your PIs for the opportunity they gave you, do not waste the opportunity of being at Northwestern and being apart of something more significant than yourself. Be honest with yourself, your PIs, and your coworkers and practice good communication with all of them. Finally, try to have a diverse research experience, be open to different perspectives and explanations because they often work together.
What is something that you could give a 10 min presentation on right off the cuff?
Chicago Bulls
What was your favorite childhood story (written, spoken, or film)?
The Giving Tree