Three DAAD RISE students work with Spacelife doctoral candidates during the summer

Catherine Gu from USA with her supervisor SpaceLife Doctoral Candidate Yu Zhang

Three students from Canada and USA arrived in June to start their internship in different fields of space life sciences. They are sponsored by the DAAD Research Internships in Science and Engineering (RISE) program for three months.

Dominique H. Haag from Vancouver, as a microbiology student, was attracted by the astrobiology topics in SpaceLife and is now supervised by the SpaceLife Doctoral Candidate Petra Schwendner. He works on the topic „Microbes hitchhiking to space“ at the DLR Institute of Aerospace Medicine, in the Astrobiology Group led by Dr. Petra Rettberg.

Katlyn Taylor, also from Canada (Winnipeg, Manitoba), has already worked on a cellular signaling pathway, the Nuclear Factor kB pathway, which is also important in the cellular response to space radiation, and with reporter proteins such as Green Fluorescent Protein. At the Institute of Aerospace Medicine, she is integrated in the Cellular Biodiagnostics Group of Dr. Christa Baumstark-Khan. SpaceLife Doctoral Candidate Arif A. Chishti advises her in using constitutive expression of a red fluorescent protein, tdTomato, as cytotoxicity and proliferation marker. Furthermore, she is involved in a toxicological project on Nuclear Factor kB activation by different chemicals.

Dominique H. Haag during his laboratory work

Catherine Gu from New Jersey, USA, works with the SpaceLife Doctoral Candidate Yu Zhang at the Applied University Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Rheinbach, in Prof. Tobiasch’s laboratory. Catherine studies Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the 12 weeks internship, Catherine will utilize human mesenchymal stem cells as model to study the underlying mechanism of atherosclerosis.