Jayda Cavanaugh ’22, a Mount Saint Mary College alumna, recently returned to her alma mater to share her working experience at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with students.
At the institute, Cavanaugh is a research technician in the Center for Cancer Genomics (CCG) and is part of both the single cell and high-throughput genomics teams.
Detailing the step-by-step process of single cell and single nuclei sequencing at CCG, Cavanaugh shared her role in the sequencing procedure and the experiences she’s had at the institute since starting last August.
“Single cell sequencing actually allows us to see that cell-to-cell variability,” Cavanaugh explained. “Where I’m working, we’re dealing with cancer tumors, and being able to see this expression changing from cell to cell is extremely important.”
Cavanaugh also shared how her time at the Mount prepared her for her current role, and offered a few words of advice to those students who were looking to go into a similar field.
“[Record keeping] is so important,” Cavanaugh stated. “Dana-Farber issues lab notebooks to you, and they are a part of the Dana-Farber library forever. We’re working with these collaborators who aren’t directly in the lab with us. So, we need to keep an extremely good notes on everything, even if it’s the tiniest thing that we notice. We need to be able to communicate all of these things, it’s part of science communication.”