{"id":7437,"date":"2018-04-30T13:18:10","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T13:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2018\/04\/30\/research-report\/"},"modified":"2022-09-07T15:02:07","modified_gmt":"2022-09-07T19:02:07","slug":"research-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/research-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ansley Ulmer \u201918 is going to Hawaii the week before graduation.<\/p>\n

But she\u2019s not getting an early start on celebrating. Ulmer is traveling to present at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Turgeon and Ulmer work together in the lab.<\/p><\/div>\n

She\u2019ll be sharing her research on a treatment for uveal melanoma \u2013 or cancer formed in the middle layer of the eye \u2013 which she completed in summer 2017 during an internship in Memphis. Ulmer shadowed Dr. Matt Wilson \u201986, professor of ophthalmology at the University of Tennessee and the St. Jude Chair in Pediatric Ophthalmology, and worked in the lab with which he\u2019s connected.<\/p>\n

Next fall, she\u2019ll be in Charleston, her hometown, to begin her studies at the Medical University of South Carolina.<\/p>\n

While she doesn\u2019t intend to pursue a Ph.D. and settle into research, her lab experiences will make her a better clinician, said Victoria Turgeon, Ulmer\u2019s academic adviser and director of Furman\u2019s neuroscience major.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor her to be able to see both of those separately and then how they\u2019re dependent on each other was really pivotal,\u201d Turgeon said.<\/p>\n

Ulmer loved that the research was tied to Dr. Wilson\u2019s clinical practice.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were working with cells that are from real human beings,\u201d she said. \u201cThe responsibility of that is huge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Uveal melanoma can metastasize quickly and viciously. Ulmer was helping research a chemotherapy that would target the secondary diseases.<\/p>\n

Students who work with Wilson \u2013 Ulmer is the second to have the opportunity \u2013 must be performing at a graduate-school level, Turgeon said. Ulmer\u2019s summer in Turgeon\u2019s lab, working on a tedious cell-identification project, had prepared her for the challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt also required her to develop some techniques on her own, that we didn\u2019t have available in the lab yet,\u201d Turgeon said. \u201cShe was very patient and methodical.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also motivated: Ulmer wrote her own grant to secure funding for her summer in Turgeon\u2019s lab. She applied for and won a travel grant to participate in the Hawaii conference this May, where she\u2019s eager to share her research with others in the field. Turgeon said Ulmer earned the privilege to interact on that level.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe played such a pivotal role in the outcome of this project,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ansley Ulmer \u201918 is going to Hawaii the week before graduation. But she\u2019s not getting an early start on celebrating. Ulmer is traveling to present at the annual meeting of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":17983,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,19,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-biology","category-the-furman-advantage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}