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PhD Graduate Applies High-Tech to Immune Studies
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Jennifer Gardy 604 827.4005; jennifer@cmdr.ubc.ca.
Marianne Meadahl/Julie Ovenell-Carter, Media & PR, 604.291.4323
Jennifer Gardy 604 827.4005; jennifer@cmdr.ubc.ca.
Marianne Meadahl/Julie Ovenell-Carter, Media & PR, 604.291.4323
June 14, 2006
It’s not hard to imagine Jennifer Gardy hosting a television science program. The diminutive PhD graduate in molecular biology and biochemistry is attractive, charming, a great communicator and, above all, intelligent – she’s one of two SFU graduate students to win a Governor General’s gold medal for superb academic performance.
Currently a post-doctoral fellow at UBC, Gardy, who grew up in Port Moody, is on track to becoming a professor since, she acknowledges, her dream of becoming a TV science host might not be terribly realistic.
Her PhD research focused on using computer science techniques to predict where in a bacterial cell a protein might be located – information that is critical to developing new drugs and vaccines. As a postdoctoral fellow, Gardy is continuing to examine therapeutic strategies, this time by understanding the human innate immune system – the body’s first line of defence against pathogens like viruses, bacteria and fungi.
“Rather than defeat pathogens by killing them with antibiotics, we want to improve the body’s firewall to keep them out in the first place,” she says.
Gardy is overseeing the development of new methods for visualizing biological networks on the computer screen. “All of the interactions between genes and proteins in our innate immune system can be thought of as a network that we can look at on the screen,” she says. “We can then overlay data from our lab experiments onto these networks to understand our results.” Gardy is working with researchers in microbiology, computing science and psychology to find better ways of representing these networks, making it easier to spot interesting trends.
It seems like a bit of a stretch for a molecular biologist who has never taken a computing science course. Her doctoral studies, she says, prepared her for ferreting out the best information from a very noisy world. “Grad school taught me to teach myself,” she notes.
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Currently a post-doctoral fellow at UBC, Gardy, who grew up in Port Moody, is on track to becoming a professor since, she acknowledges, her dream of becoming a TV science host might not be terribly realistic.
Her PhD research focused on using computer science techniques to predict where in a bacterial cell a protein might be located – information that is critical to developing new drugs and vaccines. As a postdoctoral fellow, Gardy is continuing to examine therapeutic strategies, this time by understanding the human innate immune system – the body’s first line of defence against pathogens like viruses, bacteria and fungi.
“Rather than defeat pathogens by killing them with antibiotics, we want to improve the body’s firewall to keep them out in the first place,” she says.
Gardy is overseeing the development of new methods for visualizing biological networks on the computer screen. “All of the interactions between genes and proteins in our innate immune system can be thought of as a network that we can look at on the screen,” she says. “We can then overlay data from our lab experiments onto these networks to understand our results.” Gardy is working with researchers in microbiology, computing science and psychology to find better ways of representing these networks, making it easier to spot interesting trends.
It seems like a bit of a stretch for a molecular biologist who has never taken a computing science course. Her doctoral studies, she says, prepared her for ferreting out the best information from a very noisy world. “Grad school taught me to teach myself,” she notes.
-30-