Lisa Maria DiPietro '07 of Melrose, Mass., a biology major who plans to become a physician, made some discoveries during her 10-week summer cancer research fellowship at the Boston University School of Medicine.

As a 2006 Alvan T.-Viola D. Fuller American Cancer Soicety Junior Research Fellow, she received a $3,500 stipend to study tumor suppressor genes involved in colon cancer progression. One of her achievements this summer was sub-cloning a pathway receptor to replace a deficient receptor using RNA derived from cadaver tissue.

At Boston University, DiPietro worked with Sam Thiagalingam, Ph.D., and doctoral candidate Panos Papageorgis. "The experience was wonderful," she said, "because I learned so much I had never explored before."

DiPietro said she learned of this research opportunity through an e-mail from PC's Career Planning and Internship Service. She was eager to apply because she loved doing research in molecular biology in a course with Dr. Elisabeth Arevalo, associate professor of biology, during her junior year.

DiPietro chose the cancer study partly because her grandmother is fighting leukemia. "Although the project involved a different kind of cancer from what my grandmother has," she said, "I wanted to do my part to help fight cancer. It affects a lot of people nowadays."

To date, DiPietro has applied to nine medical schools. Her goal is to have a career in clinical medicine with the possibility of medical research. Along with providing help and support to her grandmother, DiPietro has assisting hearing and vision patients and pediatric emergency patients at the Boston Medical Center and has volunteered in the recovery room of Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, R.I.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of the Providence DIGEST (Volume 12 Issue 3) and was written by Maxine Williams.