On Tuesday, July 13, UBRP students, including myself, had the opportunity to enjoy lunch at Eric’s Fine Foods with Dr. Serrine Lau of the Pharmacology and Toxicology department. Recently, Dr. Lau became the new director of the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center (SWEHSC), a multidisciplinary research facility that focuses on the affects of environmental agents and also serves as a scientific resource for educators and students.

She discussed the components of the center, including the goals of the facility and research areas being pursued. The SWEHSC is composed of 6 facility cores: Bioinformatics, Gene Delivery, Proteomics, Cellular Imaging, Genomics, and Synthetic Chemistry. Each of these cores provides services to SWEHSC researchers, students, and laboratory staff to further their personal research and allows for the collaboration of different areas of research to merge. Along with these facility cores, there are three research cores that are the core of the Mechanism of Environmental Chemical Toxicity, Pulmonary Toxicology and Lung Disease, and Chemical Chromatin Interactions. Some of the research occurring in these cores includes investigating the exact mechanism of the toxicity of smoke in human lungs and mechanistic, characteristic, and epidemiological studies on arsenic, a prevalent element in the Tucson water supply, as well as a mutagenic agent.

Along with the research that occurs at the SWEHSC, there is also an active outreach program. SWEHSC researchers and students speak to primary and secondary educators about current environmental health issues, making the general population aware of important health issues. To learn more about the SWEHSC and to get more information about general environmental health concerns affecting our home, visit:

http://swehsc.pharmacy.arizona.edu/

We also had the opportunity to hear about the three main areas of research done in Dr. Lau’s laboratory. The first area is determining the mechanism of hydroquinone-mediated carcinogenesis. The second area is establishing the process by which prostaglandins offer cytoprotection, a term used to describe the protection against chemical-induced injury. Lastly, her laboratory is perfecting methods of mass spectroscopy for proteomics, “the study of the protein complement of the genome.”

Overall, the luncheon gave us insight to new areas of research both in Dr. Lau’s laboratory and also at the SWEHSC. It also gave us the chance to meet one on one with a professor outside our area of research. Not to mention, the food was great!

Erin Blomquist, UBRPer in Dr. Jay Gandolfi’s lab, Pharmacology & Toxicology