This week, Her Campus had the opportunity to sit down with Victoria Rai, a senior in LSA studying Biophysics and Economics. Victoria is a successful researcher and scientist despite being a full-time student. Amidst all of the activities she juggles, we were lucky enough to sit down talk to her about her journey so far.
Her Campus: How did you get involved in research?
Victoria Rai: I knew I wanted to be involved in research coming in from high school, and since Michigan is such a large research body, there are so many research opportunities. I got involved through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, or UROP for short. In terms of finding the lab that I wanted to join, I know a lot of people in UROP struggled to find one that was the right fit, but because I knew my major was going to be biophysics coming in, I easily narrowed down my choices by referencing some other people in biophysics. They kind of shuffled me over to Nills Walters’s lab, and I’ve been in his lab ever since! Even past UROP he kept me on, so that was a really nice thing for him to do.
HC: Can you describe the projects you’re working on?
VR: In terms of having independent research, I didn’t really start that until the end of my sophomore year, but my freshman year project had to do with riboswitches and protein riboswitches. For more background, these are structures in the protein that control whether genes are on or off, so I worked with these structures in bacterial systems. I also started working on a CRISPR CAS 9 project for gene targeting. In general, my undergraduate studies in the Walter Lab has been in transcriptional regulation through two different systems.
HC: I know you took your research to Ghana this summer! What was that like?
VR: I went to Ghana this summer for three months through the Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training Program, or MHIRT. This experience was hosted by an ObGyn from the university. He works with maternal health and neonatal mortality, so I was conducting a neonatal mortality project in a rural district hospital in central Ghana. I was doing a lot of data collection, site work, and getting to understand how the neonatal mortality rate is being affected, what we can do to implement technology to decrease the mortality rate, and how effective these tools will essentially be. My research experience was interesting just because there were a lot of cultural components that played into my research. Things did not necessarily go the way we had anticipated, but I think that comes along with any research.
Ghana itself as a country is beautiful and is growing immensely. I got to see a lot of it over the three months. It was a very unique cultural research experience that I don’t think many undergraduates would get to have. The people I went with were great too. I got to go with six other undergrads, and they were all seniors too. I got to know them pretty well, and we have reunions every fifth of the month just because we can. We miss each other a lot because we were with each other for three months!
HC: What was your favorite part about Ghana?
VR: I think my host family was my favorite part. I’ve been abroad, so this wasn’t my first study abroad experience, and I’ve had host families, but for one reason or another, this experience just felt much more authentic. I was living with my family, I was living in this village, and I was interacting with people in the community. I did travel a lot which is unconventional and unauthentic, I think, to the Ghanaian experience, but in general I got to know Ghanaian culture very well. I was pretty immersed, and my host brothers were all great. I think that particular component of having this Ghanaian host to kind of shuffle me around and show me some things and be a true Ghanaian was probably the best part. The food was good too!
HC: What are your passions?
VR: I used to say my passion is health care just because of my personal experiences in health care but it also really captures everything that I really strive for in my academics, my personal life, and my professional life. I think in general, my passion is really just making sure that people succeed. I try and do everything in my power to make sure people have the right resources, they’re given the right motivations, and they’re given everything that they can to be successful in whatever they want to do and in whatever their definition of success is. I guess how that relates back to healthcare is that I really don’t think that your health condition or your inability to pay for some sort of health care should prevent you from pursuing your passions in life, so providing that equality or inclusive care is vital to ensure that success in the world.
HC: What would be your ideal job?
VR: My dream job is being the director of the World’s Health Organization. I think the fact that you’d be on such a public platform to initiate change in a health care setting and having so many other passionate people around you is my ideal environment. I hope that one day we reach a point where good health is something that’s attainable for everybody. That would be my ideal job just because it has a good balance between science research, public policy, and communication of science.
HC: What advice would you give to young female scientists?
VR: Definitely don’t get discouraged. I think being an older female in some pipelines deems it smart to find mentors who are similar to you. I’ve had the benefit of having a really strong female mentor throughout my research experience and it’s been phenomenal. I think that has kept me in the STEM path regardless of my gender. I think the field is actually changing a lot. I’m seeing more and more women in science – most of my professors have been women in the department. I think finding a mentor who identifies with you is important, and not getting discouraged just because you see other people not succeeding in the field. If you want to do it, you can do it.
Images courtesy of: Victoria Rai