Students from Soper group participate in Undergraduate Research Symposium

The annual Undergraduate Research Symposium at KU celebrates the diversity of undergraduate research and creative activities on campus. Two undergraduate students from the Soper research group, Shalee Mog and Breanna Diaz, presented a poster on Microfluidic-based Analysis of Circulating Tumor Cells at the April 28, 2018 symposium.

Shalee and Breanna are a part of The Emerging Scholars Program at KU that allows first-year students to use their federal work-study funds for positions as undergraduate research assistants at KU.  The goal of this initiative is to involve students in the research and creative process early on in their time at KU. This early exposure to research fosters a valuable academic experience for students.

Shalee majors in Microbiology with Pre-Med intent and a minor in Spanish. Breanna is community health major student with a minor in business. She hopes to either go into research or become an epidemiologist after she graduates from KU. Shalee and Breanna learned fabrication of microfluidic devices and their assembly. They assisted graduate students in evaluation of the process of rare biological cell isolation using microfluidic devices and the identification of cancer cells via immunostaining and impedance detection. Their work involved characterization of the cytospin process of transferring released cells from a microfluidic chip to a glass slide, utilizing different architecture transfer devices and different conditions of the cytospin centrifuge. Also, they evaluated impedance detectors sensitivity for the identification and enumeration of cancer cells.