INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2025 17 (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 14) “I had prior experience working with endothelial cells in [her] lab, and the lab I was interested in had a focus on similar research,” she said. “I highlighted that connection in my application, and the shared expertise helped get my foot in the door.” “The internship definitely built up my cell culture skills but I think the biggest thing that I gained from this internship was just confidence in doing research and speaking about it, presenting it, as well. I’ll definitely apply that to the work I’m doing this semester,” she said. “The biggest thing that I had to overcome was just admitting to myself when I was doing too much. I am a perfectionist. I like to go all the time, but there were points where I had to admit to myself that, ‘Hey, I don’t know how to do this or this is my first time doing it.’ That was one of the biggest things I needed to learn, that it is OK to mess up and it is OK to ask for help.” Moorhead plans to pursue an M.D.- Ph.D. after graduation. “Going into college, I didn’t think I wanted to do research,” she said. “When I’m in the lab, it feels right—I feel like I’m in the right place. I would do the internship again in a heartbeat.” analyze changes in gene expression, and tested barrier permeability using transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER) assays. Moorhead’s internship was supported by the Office of Naval Research’s Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (NREIP), which places college students in Department of the Navy laboratories for 10 weeks during the summer. “I was in the lab pretty much all eight hours of my day,” Moorhead said. “RT-qPCR was a completely new technique that I learned, and that allowed us to see 84 different genes that were expressed after exposure. That initial piece was about probably four weeks, then we moved on to the barrier permeability work for two weeks. We used a system that sent electrical pulses through the cell barrier to determine the permeability. We did this in a co-culture with the monocytic cells, transformed to show a macrophage phenotype.” This research enhances understanding of how directed energy-related injuries affect wound healing, potentially informing improved post-exposure treatment approaches. Direct energy injuries are damage caused by concentrated energy beams which can cause skin burns, eye damage, and internal thermal trauma. Moorhead discovered the internship on Lehigh’s Handshake platform and was drawn by connections to research she was conducting in Professor Linda Lowe-Krentz’s laboratory. versatile and safe, so she provides a vehicle to talk about the humanities,” Kramp says. “Austen is beloved, so she gives you a great entryway into living rooms to talk to people about the humanities.” The overriding goal of the podcast, he says, is for listeners “to realize that what happens in a humanities classroom is work that stays with you throughout your life.” “I want people to understand that the humanities…are integral to our lives. And when we give ourselves a chance to listen to someone like Jane Austen, who demonstrates what these humanities experiences are, we realize why the work of these disciplines is vital,” Kramp says. Biology Student Intern’s Research Helps Advance Wound Healing for Military Biology major Liliane Moorhead spent her summer advancing critical biomedical research through a prestigious internship at the Naval Medical Research Unit (NAMRU) San Antonio, located on Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Her work focused on the effects of radiofrequency radiation on immune and vascular cells of the body. Part of a select group of 10 interns, Moorhead immersed herself in laboratory research, spending full days conducting experiments under the guidance of federal research scientists. She developed a cell model to study immune responses to directed energy exposure, performed real-time reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) to Liliane Moorhead uses Reverse Transcription quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction in the lab. Courtesy Naval Medical Research Unit San Antonio
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