Research Frontiers

Dr. Ron Kopito and Dr. Brigit Riley

Life as a post-doctoral student

Dr. Riley came to the Kopito lab as a post-doctoral fellow. She entered the lab with a few other scientists who were interested in working on autophagy, so she had a new group of people to collaborate with on projects. She found that the Kopito lab is unique because it has a good environment and good energy. Everyone works together, especially within the group of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows working on autophagy. She also notes they are unusually dynamic, and they like to act on an idea quickly rather than wait around. She also comments that Dr. Kopito is great about helping his graduate students and post-docs to act quickly on a project idea by supplying them with necessary equipment, materials, and advice.

As a post-doctoral student, Dr. Riley finds that it is a challenge to balance bench work and experiments with meetings, writing papers, meeting people, and making contacts, all of which are important parts of a post-doctoral student’s work. She found that it was not as hard to balance responsibilities as a graduate student, but there are more tasks and more pressure now. She also wants to stay on top of current research about HD and autophagy, but finds it more difficult than she expected. Because there are so many different approaches to the subject, it is hard to know what is going on in the field. Furthermore, the lack of communication between other scientists in the field makes it hard to design experiments.

When asked if her fellow researchers at the Kopito lab have focused their goals on contributing to a cure for HD, or rather on the joy of scientific discovery, she says the Kopito lab is a combination of attitudes. Her old lab (where she did her graduate studies) focused on either curing or understanding the initial steps of HD. At the Kopito lab, there is more of a balance between both attitudes. Personally, when she thinks only about the joy of discovery or the intellectual pursuit of understanding HD, she becomes concerned that it isn’t really relevant to the people who are affected by HD. She thinks that scientists are really far removed from the fact that this is a fascinating scientific question, but also involves patients and their families.

For Dr. Riley, the excitement in studying autophagy is in the hopes of “find[ing] a drug that would promote it”. But it also prompts questions about the nature of HD treatment- do people want to take a drug treatment for their whole lives? Is it too inconvenient or difficult of a method? Optimistically, she says, maybe this drug approach will be used to treat symptoms starting in 5 to 10 years, but it would be nice if gene therapy was possible. If they were developed around the same time, it would give people options in how they want to be treated, which she believes is an important aspect of scientific research and medicine.

Last Modified: 09/11/2007

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