When she came to Pitt, Siao-Han (Phoebe) Huang didn’t stray far from her undergraduate roots in chemistry. Not only did she remain at the same school, but she remained in the same lab working on the same project.
“I really liked what [Professor Amemiya] was doing, and I was interested in his work,” Huang says. “I compared the offers I had from other graduate schools, and I felt like the offer [at Pitt] was the best suited for me.”
In the Amemiya lab, Huang used transient scanning electrochemical microscopy to examine and quantify the thermodynamic and kinetic interactions between neurotoxic dipeptide repeats—which play a role in a number of neurological diseases—and the nuclear pore complexes (NPC) to understand how the NPC engage in selective and efficient molecular transport.
Staying in the same lab enabled Huang to get off to a rapid start with her graduate research, and she finished her PhD in only three and a half years. Soon, she’ll be heading to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a postdoc.
“I’m really excited because they have some really advanced instrumentation there for biomedical research,” Huang says. “I’ll be working on detection of neurotransmitter release for cancer and neuron-like cells, so while it will be different, I will still be doing scanning electrochemical microscopy, just with a more biological focus.”
Huang says that staying in Prof. Amemiya’s lab for both her undergraduate and graduate research raised his expectations for her, but he was still approachable and a good mentor.
“He was a good mentor in more than just a scientific way,” Huang says. “He taught me how to communicate very clearly and he expects you to know what you’re talking about.”
At Pitt, Huang says she particularly appreciated the many opportunities for collaboration with the medical school, UPMC, and various shared research facilities, which allow researchers to work at an even higher level.
“Let's say we need to get samples for our research. We can get in contact with the health sciences research facilities like the synthesis core to make a certain peptide for us,” Huang says.
Huang also says she has appreciated the amount of support and guidance she received from her professors at Pitt, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student.
“The chemistry professors were very interactive and personal” Huang says. “They’ll talk to you outside of class [and] introduce you to research you’re interested in, and they’ll talk to you about career development at an early stage.”
