Morgan Gold: Faculty of Science

Summer research internship at Tel Aviv University

First and foremost, I would like to thank the donors of the Schull Yang International Experience Awards as they have allowed me to have an absolutely incredible summer doing ground-breaking research, in a foreign country.

At the beginning of the Fall 2018 semester, I will be starting my final year in Honours Microbiology and Immunology at McGill. This program focuses on immunology as well as many aspects of microbiology, such as bacteriology, parasitology and virology. In fact, I am currently pursuing my honours project in a parasitology lab. However, this program is lacking in the study of fungi, mycology. Furthermore, as I have lived in Montreal my whole life, I have never had the experience of living alone while experiencing university. Therefore, upon learning that the Schull Yang International Experience Award could allow me to do research in a different country, I just had to apply and as I received the award, I am so extremely grateful to the donors.

I spent three months doing research at the Osherov Fungal Infection Lab at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Not only was the university campus amazing and beautiful, the lab itself was incredible. The lab equipment was all state of the art and the research being done is on the front line of amazing discoveries. Furthermore, Tel Aviv is an unbelievable city to live in. As someone who learned Hebrew growing up, living in Tel Aviv gave me an amazing chance to perfect my Hebrew.

During these three months I was paired with a PhD student in the lab. Being mentored by her, as well as a large involvement of the professor, allowed me to learn a lot about mycology, as well as the lab techniques necessary to study mycology. My project was to delete two genes from the pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus. This fungus is present on every single continent on Earth and is extremely dangerous, especially for immunocompromised people. I did this by creating a vector, using polymerase chain reaction and Gibson assembly, and then transforming it into the fungus to replace the genes of interest with an antifungal resistance selection gene.

As mentioned earlier, the program I am in at McGill is lacking in mycology. Doing research at this lab allowed me to expand and achieve a more complete understanding of mycology. I believe that this experience truly brought together what it means to attain a bachelor’s degree in Honours Microbiology and Immunology.

While I did spend a lot of time in the lab, I was still able to enjoy living in a different country. As mentioned previously, I was able to perfect my Hebrew. Furthermore, I was able to enjoy the beautiful weather, amazing food and explore the incredibly interesting culture. On the weekends, I found myself constantly taking advantage of living thirty minutes away from a beautiful beach.

This whole experience was only possible thanks to the generous donors of the Schull Yang International Experience Awards. The award allowed me to participate in programs at Tel Aviv University, live at the university dormitories, as well as paid for food and transportation. This whole experience allowed me to not only learn more about mycology, thus further completing my degree in Honours Microbiology and Immunology, but also to learn how culture can affect the lab environments and how research is approached. This was an experience I will never forget as not only did it allow me to learn a lot in the field of mycology, living in a new country by myself allowed me to learn about living alone.

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