Celebrating ‘Undergraduate Research Week,’ April 11-15 Newswise — Last November, the U.S. House of Representatives proclaimed the week of April 11-15 “Undergraduate Research Week,” recognizing the importance of undergraduate research and of cultivating innovative, creative and enterprising young researchers in collaboration with dedicated faculty.
While undergraduate research opportunities may be of immediate benefit to those who take advantage of them, they also can come full circle. Such is the case with Michael Kuhns, PhD, and the University of Arizona.
In the early 1990s, Dr. Kuhns, then an undergraduate at the UA, applied to the Undergraduate Biology Research Program (UBRP) as a way to pursue science during the summer and support himself at the same time. Today, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Immunobiology at the UA College of Medicine.
As a boy, the Prescott, Ariz., native imagined himself a scientist – he likes to know how things work – and had been considering marine biology as a vocation. His tenure as a student at the UA and his work with UBRP reshaped that notion.
UBRP, an educational program begun in 1988 in the UA Department of Biochemistry, teaches science by involving students in biologically related research and pays students for their time in the lab. For Dr. Kuhns, UBRP offered an alternative to spending the Arizona summer as a landscaper. It also helped set the course of his professional life.
“As an undergraduate in the biochemistry department, I was inspired by a lecture in which Dr. William Grimes described work aimed at harnessing the immune system to fight cancer,” Dr. Kuhns says. “I was fortunate to be accepted into UBRP and was given the opportunity to exercise my curiosity in Dr. Grimes’ lab.”
Dr. Kuhns received his bachelor’s degree from the UA in 1993. With his enthusiasm for immunology and immunotherapy enhanced by his UBRP experience, he pursued graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, with James P. Allison, PhD, one of the world’s leading tumor researchers. There he was impressed continually by the importance of basic research – understanding how things work at the molecular and cellular level – to disease processes and therapeutics.
He became interested increasingly in understanding events that regulate immune responses to prevent autoimmunity and, at the same time, ensure that appropriate immune responses occur upon vaccination or infection. It was accepted generally that much of this information passes through the T cell receptors (TCR), but the mechanisms were poorly understood. Dr. Kuhns began postdoctoral work on TCRs in 2001 at Stanford University.
“I was driven by the fact that we didn’t know how it works,” he says. He continued at Stanford, collaborating with leading experts on TCR, Mark Davis, PhD, and K. Chris Garcia, PhD, until spring 2010, when he joined the UA faculty.
At Stanford, his work led researchers to recognize a “functional sidedness” to the TCR, with each side playing distinct roles in the proper functioning of the TCR.
In his lab at the UA, Dr. Kuhns is continuing his study of the TCR, using live-cell imaging to look at the interaction of proteins and T cells in order to understand how the TCR influences T cell responses to vaccines, pathogens and autoantigens. Ultimately, he anticipates applying the basic knowledge that results to the development of immunotherapeutic reagents.
An argument can be made for this important work beginning with UBRP and Dr. Grimes’ lab. “That’s how I got excited about science and why I stayed in academics,” says Dr. Kuhns. Enthusiastic about teaching and advising, particularly in these challenging times for research funding, he adds, “We’re at real risk for losing a generation of scientists; it’s essential that we excite students about science as early as possible.”
Dr. Kuhns worked with numerous students during his years at UC Berkeley and Stanford. As his scientific career began at the UA, it is fitting that, during his first summer as a UA faculty member, a high school student cloned the first gene in his lab, and currently he is mentoring a student in UBRP.
Dr. Kuhns currently is working with colleagues Janko Nickolas-Zugich, MD, PhD, head of the UA Department of Immunobiology, and Jeffrey Frelinger, PhD, professor in the UA Department of Immunobiology and director of the graduate program in immunobiology, on a major grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, to study declining immunity among the elderly.
The Undergraduate Biology Research Program (UBRP), started in 1988 and directed by University Distinguished Outreach Professor Carol Bender, provides research education and experience to UA undergraduates. The program, which began with 19 students and 13 faculty members, now supports 140 UA undergraduate students per year and includes more than 240 faculty sponsors. UBRP alumni are on faculty at prestigious academic institutions nationwide. Like Dr. Michael Kuhns, many former UBRP students have returned to the UA as faculty members. Among them are Kevin Bonine, PhD, adjunct assistant professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Katherine Hiller, MD, assistant professor, Department of Emergency Medicine; Rebecca Mosher, PhD, assistant professor, School of Plant Sciences; and Joyce Schroeder, PhD, associate professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. UBRP alumni Anthony Stazzone, MD, and Jennifer Suriano, MD, MPH, who are internal medicine specialists at University Medical Center North Hills Clinic, are among the 99 UBRP alumni who are practicing physicians in Arizona. For more information about UBRP, visit http://ubrp.arizona.edu/
RSS