Week of July 15

This week, the SURF student talked to with Dr. John Littleton (MD/PhD) who is the founder of Naprogenix.  Check out his web site to learn more the approaches he uses to identify new medicine from natural products.  The SURES students chatted with  Dr.Brett Spear who studies liver gene expression and is also the Director of Graduate Studies for the Integrated Biomedical Science program for the College of Medicine.    Check out his web site to learn more http://microbiology.med.uky.edu/users/bspear#profileTab3

For our Thursday activity, we learned about entomology, by taking a tour of several entomology laboratories in the College of Agriculture, Food and the Environment.  Laura Rosenwald was our tour guide (https://entomology.ca.uky.edu/person/laura-rosenwald).  After the tour, we met with Dr. Carmen Agouridis who will tell us about environmental engineering, water resources and climate change.  You can read more about Dr. Agouridis here.   She also has a  very interesting podcast--https://kyh2o.podbean.com/. 

Since climate change is predicted to bring about an increase in vector and water-borne diseases as described in the attached report-this type of knowledge will be invaluable for us as we start to envision solutions.