Bhavana Pavuluri is a junior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She currently works in a lab that focuses on therapies such as adoptive T-cell therapy. Her project involves investigating differences between the effects of the cytokine IL-21 on mixed immune populations compared to isolated T cell populations.
She started her current research in the summer of 2021 and has since been continuing her research. She got started in the Paulos lab by first narrowing down her research interests and then looking into labs that focused on that specific subject. Then she further did more background research into the previous work of each lab and then decided which labs she should reach out to.
Bhavana believes that her research has impacted her undergraduate career by allowing her to make connections between her research and classes and apply them to the real world. Through her presentations and symposium and lab meetings, she was also able to network with other scientists. Although she doesn’t plan on pursuing research as a professional career, the skills she has learned as a researcher have been critical to her development as a person and student by improving her skills in communication, scientific writing, problem-solving, and attention to detail.
She wants to thank her PI and graduate student mentor for being her biggest role models in research. They broke down how the scientific process works and taught her how to think in an analytic and creative way in order to search for gaps in knowledge to formulate scientific questions.
One thing she wished she knew before starting her undergraduate research journey is that sometimes experiments may not go the way she predicts, but it is important to keep an open mind because paying attention to those deviations can be helpful for future projects.
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