The Summer Platform for Undergraduate Research is an annual exhibition for UTD undergrads to showcase their research projects to judges and peers. Last Month, SPUR’s student participants designed and presented research posters judged by graduate students and professors with the chance of winning an assortment of prizes. Out of over 300 students, biology senior Ashley Cua and biomedical engineering senior Piper Welsh both received the highest prize: the UTD President’s Office Award.
Both Cua and Welsh were already undergraduate researchers — at bioengineering professor Kristin Miller’s lab, and biology professor Yongsheng Gao’s lab and bioengineering professor Jacopo Ferruzzi’s lab, respectively — before applying to SPUR and spent the summer working on their projects.
Welsh’s work focused on understanding Inflammatory Bowel Disease by studying how the disease impacted the colon tissue of affected mice. She added a chemical called DSS into the mice’s drinking water to stimulate an inflammatory response in their bowels similar to how IBD presents in humans, and found that some layers of the mice’s colon tissue thinned out while other layers didn’t seem to change. Understanding these tissue changes, Welsh said, is important for understanding how IBD impacts humans and could be treated.
In addition, Welsh also inspected the quantities of collagen in the mice’s colons during wound healing, a process caused by inflammation from IBD. Collagen has an integral role in healing — without it, the process stalls.
“There weren’t any real clear changes [in collagen amount] that we could see,” Welsh said. “There wasn’t anything that was noticeable, maybe there’s a little bit of change [in some areas of the colon] but it was difficult to quantify that.”
Beyond spending time in the lab studying mice and analyzing tissue samples, much of Welsh’s research also involved data processing. She built a program using MATLAB to analyze different colon thicknesses and determine whether stimulated IBD was causing thickening, thinning or no changes.
“Nothing is going to be instantaneous as much as we all wish it would,” Welsh said. “It [her research] required patience, it required a lot of dedication to get through.”
Cua’s research focused on determining if age can impact the contractility — the ability to shrink in diameter — of mouse cervixes in the context of preterm birth. If a cervix is unable to contract when it should, it increases the risk of preterm birth and directly affects the health of the fetus and mother.
Cua looked at four different age groups of mice and determined each group’s cervix contractility using an “organ bath,” which is a special environment that gives oxygen and glucose to the isolated cervix, allowing for it to contract outside of the mouse’s body. The preliminary results suggest that age impacts contractility: mice in the two to three month age group and those older than 11 months had the lowest contractility, while four to six-month-old mice had the highest. Cua said that three to six-month-old mice and 20-30 year old humans are thought to be roughly analogous in age. The mice appear to have the highest contractility at an age where human preterm birth rates are lowest.
“This research establishes a groundwork for future studies to become more targeted and have the application of reducing preterm births,” Cua said.
Cua said the idea for this research stemmed from how vascular muscle cells — like heart cells — lose their ability to contract with age. That inspired her to hypothesize whether the same phenomena happened with cervical muscle cells as well.
“Unfortunately, there isn’t much research about the female reproductive system, and especially not with factors of age,” Cua said. “A lot of the research that is done on the female reproductive system isn’t about contractility specifically; we’re seeing less of the contractility testing.”
Like Welsh, Cua also noted that research is an extensive process and that commitment is needed for notable results.
“It’s a process that takes a lot of time,” Cua said. “You’re going to get the most yield if you dedicate a larger amount of time [towards research].”
Looking to the future, now with SPUR wins under their belt, both Cua and Welsh have ambitions to publish their work in scientific journals and attend conferences to share their work.
“Because of the research that I had conducted, it makes me want to do a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering,” Welsh said. “I started doing research and knew this is where I want to be.”