This month Amy Bounds and Sophie Hurwitz completed the Engage Science Communication course by each giving a 20-minute talk at the Vermillion Art Gallery in Capital Hill. The talks were about their scientific research but instead of your typical jargon filled talk this one was targeted to a public audience.
Amy’s talk was titled “The case of the missing protein” where she talked about her journey as a scientist to uncover the role of MSTO1 in the cell. Her goal was to educate the audience on how the loss of a single protein can disrupt a cell and cause disease. Amy modeled her scientific journey as a mystery to highlight how just like in detective stories, scientific research rarely takes a linear path. Instead you must follow the clues in your data. More often than not this leads you to red herrings before you find the answer to the mystery.
Sophie’s talk was titled “Dancing through life: mitochondria in motion” where they talked about how everything in life needs to move – even the smallest protein 
machines in our cells. They connected their own love of dancing to how the mitofusins dance when undergoing mitochondrial fusion. Sophie elegantly described the FRET system they built to measure conformational changes in the mitofusins and how this system can be used to measure extremely small changes in proteins.
Want to know more about this program check out the Engage Website here!