Wing Yee (Jennifer) Wan '12

Jen is currently attending School of Medicine at Hofstra University.

Hi, I’m Jen Wan, a recent graduate of Wellesley College. I was a Classical Civilization major and Biology minor, and I had been part of the Tetel lab since Fall 2009. My overall goal was to investigate how hormones act in the brain. 

I worked on two projects: the first was to analyze how mouse progestin receptor subtypes interact with steroid receptor coactivators in the female mouse brain using a protein-protein pull-down assay. The second project focused on how mouse estrogen receptors interact with these coactivators. Rosalind Lai ’11 and I had worked on sub-cloning mouse estrogen receptors in order to perform the subsequent pull-down assays. 

I have also worked for two summers at the Lipid Metabolism lab of the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, located in Boston. I had the opportunity to study how the drug Rosuvastatin, commonly known as Crestor, causes a decrease in LDL (bad) cholesterol while increasing HDL (good) cholesterol.

I also volunteer at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in the hematology/oncology ward, and work part-time as a clinical research assistant for the Newborn Medicine department of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I will be attending medical school in Fall 2011 and hope to combine the more individualized nature of patient care with the broader range of scientific research.