Are You Curious about Science? Try Medical Research!

My name is Nicholas Cifuentes. I am working here in the Dutch lab and I am doing post doctoral research. I grew up on Chile actually. I did my undergraduate and graduate studies in there and then I came here to the US to do my post doc here at the University of Kentucky. Basically I just found this job announcement on the Dutch lab in there and I experience in biology so this work really fit very well with my CV and I apply and Becky liked my CV and I end up in here so I'm very happy actually, being here on this lab. There are no scientists on my family but I was kind of pushed to do science. I was really curious about things so I always enjoyed science especially chemistry and math and later, biology. Then on college I became very interested in biochemistry so that's what I studied finally. I think that as most of scientists what drives you is curiosity. To know things, to understand things. So I will say that that's basically what, why you pursue science. Curiosity were natural like for biology, for chemistry, for what is happening, for things that happen that you cannot see actually in a microscopic world. We have to be writing, reading about the literature, which every day is being updated so we need to be updated on what we know, or what is new on science. And then we work half of the time on the bench doing the experiments. But we spend a lot of time learning the experiments and thinking about what is next step so it is not all the time doing experimental job. It's half and half mostly, yeah. I'm working on two different projects. So the lab in general works with two different viruses. One of them is Hendra virus and the other one is human metapneumovirus. Both of them can affect humans and I am working in these two different projects. Basically we're trying to understand how these viruses assemble inside the cell and build a new viral particle that is going to be spread to other humans, from one person to the other. It's very important for us to understand how the viruses assemble because that way we can identify new targets that will potentially be therapeutic targets. So we are trying to identify new ways in which these viruses are being assembled in the cell. And it's interesting that even when these viruses have been discovered from a long time, it's really not much what we know about them. So that's quite interesting. So we are going to identify a new therapeutic targets. I think that's the most interesting part. Even when we are doing basic science, doing basic science you usually find very interesting things. It's very exciting when you find something that you didn't know and you were not expecting. Because sometimes you wait for a result, you think that something is going to happen and then you find that it's all the opposite of what you were thinking so that is exciting because it's open new research language. The experiments are not going to work at the first or the second or maybe the third time, but you just have to be persistent. It's mostly about being persistent in the experiments and the job. I'm very happy to come to Lexington. It's a wonderful city. First of all, I have family so for our family it's a very good place to grow, to see your childs grow, and it's a very nice lab environment. We work together as a team and you don't always find that on labs or in jobs in general. But I'm pretty happy that we here have form a team. And Becky is especially, she's very good team leader. She's a very well connected person. She's very smart. And she teach you a lot about, not only about science but also about how to be involved with other scientists. So, and we are doing great science which is the most important part. We are doing great science. We are publishing on the best journals. So, it's a great place to be.