This summer, Daniela Danilova was a member of the 2024 Summer Scholars cohort at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) at Wake Forest University as the Billy and Deborah Prim scholar.
She worked under Dr. Sean Murphy at the Murphy Lab on a project focused on characterizing dose-toxicity relationships for ammonia gas exposure on airway organ-tissue equivalent models. Ammonia has a wide variety of industrial uses, yet there is little research on the effects of acute exposure to the gas due to a lack of model that can be used to impose such extreme conditions on biological samples. She investigated the delivery of lethal dosages of ammonia gas to three-dimensional organ-tissue equivalent cultures of the human airway as a possible pre-clinical model of acute toxic exposure that can be used for the evaluation of potential treatment options, offering an advantage over the common monoculture in its closer resemblance the in-vivo environment.
This is what Daniela had to say about the program: “It was a very rewarding experience not only in terms of the technical skills I’ve acquired but also with the people I got to meet and the confidence I’ve obtained from presenting my research to an audience. It was interesting to see pulmonary research from a completely different angle.”
Additionally, Daniela submitted another successful research proposal and received an offer for the Honors Carolina William W. & Ida W. Taylor Faculty-Mentored Research Fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill.
Congratulations, Daniela!