Alex (Part II)

Alex:

Graduate Researcher

Lammerding Lab

How has your life changed since you started cancer research?

“I think my life has changed since coming to Cornell and doing cancer research because I have interacted with a lot more patients with the [Finger Lakes] Cancer Resource Center. I think, for me, that substantially changed things.”

What’s the most rewarding thing about your research?

“I think it’s rewarding to be at Cornell and humbling to be at Cornell and getting a PhD because personally neither one of my parents even went to college. No one in my family had ever gone to college before. And it’s rewarding to be able to study this because when my mom had cancer, she didn’t even understand what cancer was. And basically the doctor made all the decisions for her. So it’s rewarding for me to understand what cancer is and the depth and complicated nature of it.”

What’s the hardest part about your research?

“The biggest challenge is sometimes you don’t want to be to close to things [emotionally]…I do cancer research and in October I had a friend pass away from metastatic breast cancer. And that was probably the most challenging time for me because it felt very close to me. It was something I was immediately dealing with.”

How has your research changed any of your viewpoints about cancer?

“For me, [my viewpoint on cancer] has completely [changed] because cancer was the thing that was going to take away my mom. Until I was in college and wanted to be part of the Cancer Cell Biology Group, and I got accepted to the group…I didn’t really understand cancer at all. And I think that it was a very threatening thing to me because if my parents didn’t understand [cancer], how could I possibly understand it? So my viewpoint has changed from something that is completely a black box to something that is much more clear to me.”

What is your stance on public engagement in science in cancer research?

“I think that as a scientist, getting money from the federal government and other organizations, it is our duty to tell [the public] what we are finding and to help educate people about what their tax dollars are going to. Specifically, in my family, I had an uncle that would always say, ‘The government already has a cure to cancer and they are just hiding it from us.’ And the fact that people ever think that is a really scary thing because they clearly just don’t know what’s going on in the scientific world. And as scientist, it's our duty to let people know what we are doing, what we are accomplishing, and how complicated [research] is because otherwise who is going to tell them if you don’t tell them?”