Basic medical sciences student wins Stanford BioX Award

Megan Patterson, front row, center, is among the attendees of the workshop at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University.

Megan Patterson, center, receives the award from

representatives from Stanford University's SLAC

National Accelerator Laboratory. 

Megan Patterson, a first-year student in the Basic Medical Sciences Graduate Program at the Whiddon College of Medicine, was named one of three national recipients of the Stanford BioX Award by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. The $1,000 award included a week-long crystallography course at SLAC, a renowned national basic research laboratory in Menlo Park, California, that has produced at least four Nobel prizes.  

Patterson, who is on the molecular, cell, and cancer biology track in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, said the experience allowed her to learn from experts in the field of X-ray crystallography. One highlight, she said, was that many of the lectures on data processing programs used to decipher the data students collected were taught by the people who created the programs.  

The weeklong camp also allowed her to meet other students and scientists working in the structural biology field. “It was really cool to hear how the techniques we learned at the workshop could be utilized for so many different applications,” Patterson said. “There was a wide range of study topics from the medical sciences to environmental science.” 

During the course, Patterson met Brandon D’Arcy, Ph.D., a graduate of USA’s Basic Medical Sciences Graduate Program. D’Arcy conducted postdoctoral research in the lab where Patterson now works under the mentorship of Aishwarya Prakash, Ph.D., an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and pharmacology.

“Brandon’s work as a postdoc laid a lot of the groundwork for what I am now studying with my dissertation project,” she said, “so it was exciting to get to meet him in person for the first time and share stories about the lab and discuss ideas to bring back to my project here.”  

Part of Patterson’s current research aims to decipher the structural and mechanical properties of two key proteins of the DNA mismatch repair pathway, MLH1 and PMS2.  

“My hope is that by figuring out how these proteins function normally compared to when they are mutated, I can shed light on how some individuals with Lynch Syndrome may develop cancer while others may not,” she said.  

Lynch Syndrome, Patterson noted, is a hereditary cancer syndrome where people have a defect in one of four mismatch repair genes, leading to a buildup of mutations, and predisposing them to developing several different forms of cancer.