Dr. Cynthia Darnell’s path to becoming a postdoctoral researcher in the Amy Schmid Labat Duke University was, in her words, “not straightforward.”
At the start of her post-high school career, Darnell had no clue what she wanted to do, so she went to community college for the first two years while she decided. She had anticipated that she was going to go to college as an art major, but had always enjoyed biology.
While at community college she took a couple biology courses. She transferred to another college where she took a course in genetics and according to her, “it blew my mind.” While at the college she took a variety of different biology courses. Her genetics professor’s wife was looking for a lab technician in the microbiology lab she ran. After Darnell worked there for two years, she decided to go to graduate school and had a whole list of places/universities she could attend.
However, after going to a conference in Chicago and meeting her future graduate advisor, Darnell made the decision to go to Iowa for six years of Graduate school. She ended up in the Schmid Lab at Duke University for her “postdoc” after her boss had recommended the lab to her.
Previously, Darnell had done research on the connectedness of genetic pathways in halophilic extremophiles — bacteria that lived in extremely salty conditions. She developed projects to understand the how their genetic network sends and receives signals.
Darnell is continuing that research at Duke while also looking at the effects of different environmental factors on growth and the genetic network using mutant halophilic extremophiles.
There are generally three different paths Darnell’s day in the lab can take. The first path is a bench day. During a bench day, she will be doing experiments looking at growth curves, microscopes or RNA extracts. The second path is a computational day in which she will do sequencing to look at gene expression. The third option is a writing day in which she spends a majority of her time writing up grants, papers, and applications.
Dr. Darnell wishes to open up her own lab in the future and serve underprivileged students in underserved areas. She wishes to do more research in the area of archaebacteria because of how under researched and underrepresented it is in the scientific community. Dr. Darnell hopes to study more about the signaling networks in archaebacteria in her own lab someday.
She especially wishes to be able to open her lab up to underprivileged students, exposing them to the possibilities of research and graduate programs.
Guest Post by Tejaswi Siripurapu, NCSSM 2019