Sydney Shaw Sydney was a graduate student at Northeastern University in Boston, MA (Fall 2012 - May 2015). She earned her MS in Chemical Engineering and now works as a Process Engineer in Manufacturing Science and Technology at Genzyme (now Sanofi) in Cambridge/Allston, MA. ------------------------------- LAB PROFILE at PENN STATE -------------------------------- I am an undergraduate student in my senior year (graduating August 2012) and have been working in the Curtis Lab since the fall of 2008. My primary focus has been on the construction of low cost temporary immersion bioreactors for scalable plant propagation. I have worked with both organogenic and embryogenic tissue, including cacao, watermelon, and tobacco cultures. I assisted on a project to construct a multiplexed setup of temporary immersion reactors for somatic embryogenesis of T. cacao. Currently, I am prototyping a gravity-driven plastic bag reactor for watermelon shoot proliferation that can be scaled up to run in a greenhouse. I worked full-time in the Curtis Lab during the summer of 2009 thanks to a grant from Nunhems USA, who has funded my watermelon propagation project. During the summer of 2010, I was able to spend time in Davis, CA working with Nunhems to see more of the agricultural biotechnology industry. During the summer of 2011, I worked as an intern at Pioneer Hi-Bred in Newark, DE. I worked with the Controlled Environments team that tests all of DuPont Ag Biotech's transgenic soybean material (from Wilmington, DE) in the greenhouse before it is ready to be tested out in the field.
After I graduate in August 2012, I'll be heading on to graduate school in Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Eventually, I'd like to do research and development in the agricultural biotechnology industry or with plant-derived pharmaceuticals. In June 2012, I won first place at the Plant Biotechnology Student Oral Presentation Competition at the Society for In-vitro Biology World Congress in Bellevue, WA. I was elected Student Committee Chair for the SIVB during this coming year (2012-2013).
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