"Every time you get sick there is a mini battle raging inside your body. I think that’s so cool!"

Troy Shirley
Mobile, Alabama

Why immunology: The Struggle

The immune system is your body’s defense against the world. Every time you get sick there is a mini battle raging inside your body. I think that’s so cool! The Current Topics in Immunology course is really my first experience with anything focused solely on immunology. It’s interesting learning about the mechanisms by which the immune system operates, but also how this plays out on a larger scale in disease outbreaks and the development of medicines.

Lab experience

I worked at the Mitchell Cancer Institute in Mobile for about a year. My mentor, Dr. Steve McClellan, is studying stem cells in tumors. There are still stem cells present throughout a person’s organs when they are fully grown, and if one of these types of cells becomes cancerous, the cancer can be a lot harder to remove than in other cases. While I interned there, he was trying to develop a solution that would propagate the growth of these cancerous stem cells so they could be studied more easily.

What's your favorite part of the immune system?

"My favorites are eosinophils, because they deal with parasites." – Troy Shirleyg