From June to August, recent MIT graduate Lucia Padilla is spending two months in Freiburg as an intern in the research group of CIBSS junior professor Dr. Natalie Köhler. Her internship is supported through the MISTI MIT programme, which enables students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, to gain valuable research experience abroad. In this interview with Michal Rössler from CIBSS, Lucia Padilla talks about what brought her to Freiburg and her experiences so far.

Hi Lucia, thanks for meeting me. I am really excited to hear how you like Freiburg and what your experiences in a CIBSS lab have been so far. You are a fourth-year bioengineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Is that correct?

Lucia: I actually just graduated from MIT in June. And then I came here right after graduation.

Oh wow, congratulations! And did you have a special reason why you wanted to come to Germany? Was it because of your minor in German?

Yes, that was one of the main reasons I wanted to come. But even before that, I went to a German elementary school and was surrounded by German culture for a long time, but never actually got to come to Germany. So I was really eager to use the German I have been learning.

Is this your first time in Germany?

I actually came to Freiburg for a week earlier this year to visit a friend. And I really loved the city and wanted to come back. I thought that it was really interesting the way in which the University of Freiburg is integrated into the city, and I was really inspired by all of the research opportunities that the city has to offer in the fields of biology. I also really like being outdoors, so I was excited for the opportunity to be in a city that is so close to the black forest and has such rich history and culture.  Then the coordinator of the MIT-Germany program told me about CIBSS and how well it matches some of the research I've been doing on campus. And now I am really happy to be back for eight weeks to do an internship here!

That’s wonderful! Can you tell me more about the program through which you came here?

The program is called MISTI MIT, which basically allows students to go abroad and do an internship or to work in research at a lab. It is fully sponsored by MIT and you get to do something related to your major or something completely new.

What kind of research did you do at MIT and how does that relate to the project you are doing now at CIBSS?

While at MIT, I worked in two labs at the Koch Institute that focused on cancer research. There, I got to work with CAR T-cell therapy, which are modified T-cells that are used in cancer immunotherapy. Then I worked with viruses, which were ultimately going to relate to CAR T-cell therapy and other types of immunotherapies for cancer. The research group here at CIBSS is focused on GVHD, so they are basically looking at the things I was working on from a different perspective. GVHD stands for graft versus host disease. This is what can happen with these types of therapies where T cells are transplanted into a cancer patient. The cells, instead of just killing the cancer, can start killing the person's own cells. This leads to a really painful and often fatal reaction. So I used to focus on the side of targeting the cancer, and now I think more about the side effects.

Are there any special techniques that you learnt here?

Yes, I actually just did my first qPCR, which I have never done before. And I have been doing a lot of cell culture, so maintaining cell lines, and learning how to grow cells in a slightly different way than I was used to.

Is it very different from your previous lab experience at MIT?

Not too different. A lot of the techniques carry over, luckily. But I think it is interesting how even the staining of the cells can be a little bit different in each lab.

Now that you are basically halfway through your internship, what are your goals for the second half?

I think the first half was more getting used to the lab and learning how things work, and now I'm starting to plan my own experiments. Hopefully I'll get some good results! The experiments are related to my supervisor's project, which looks at how a certain micro-RNA affects GVHD in mice. The part I am looking at is even more specific: I am looking at how macrophages are affected when this micro-RNA is knocked out in CAR T cells. But let's see if it works (laughs).

Yes, there can always be the unexpected. Speaking of which, was there anything that surprised you when you came here? Like the science, or the city, or Germany in general?

I was really surprised that everybody spoke English here and that everybody was really willing to explain things to me, which was really nice and definitely very welcoming. And I like that people encourage me to speak German whenever I want to (laughs). It's really sweet. And - I'm trying to think more on the science side - I think it surprised me how even though the science is in a different language, it's still all pretty similar. And it was cool to see that I could bring some things that I learned at MIT to the lab, and also learn so much more in this lab.

That is great to hear! Thank you so much for this talk and for your time.

Thank you!

Lucia Padilla is interning in the research group of CIBSS junior professor Dr. Natalie Köhler at the University Medical Center Freiburg. Natalie Köhler is researching how a better understanding of the signaling processes in cancer cells and immune cells can help to develop better therapies for leukemia patients. When asked about the current addition to the lab, she said: “Lucia is very interested and motivated and enriches our team a lot. She is successfully supporting two of my students in their work on CAR T-cells.”

Köhler research group website

If you want to learn more about current opportunities at CIBSS, consult our careers page or contact positions(at)cibss.uni-freiburg.de. Research at CIBSS spans disciplines from genetics to biochemistry and from medicine to plant sciences. With its diverse research groups and topics, the Cluster of Excellence offers many opportunities for national and international researchers at all stages of their careers.