 Texas Heart Institute's rich history and commitment to education makes it the perfect host for students in search of a deeper understanding of cardiovascular research and medicine. This summer, T.H.I.'s Vice President for Research, Dr. Darren Woodside and Director of Biology, Dr. Peter van der Sleis, mentored two bright students. My name is Matthew Nguyen, I'm a junior at Texas A&M University and I currently work at Melvick Glitter Choreology Research Lab as a student intern at Texas Heart Institute. My name is Mikayla, I'm an incoming freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. Why are you interested in STEM? I've always loved science and thanks to shadowing and volunteering and working at different research labs I was able to you know open my eyes to what really goes on behind the scenes in medicine and what it really takes to help patients. Going into a career in STEM whether that's in the clinical setting or the research setting or something similar would really help me to develop a more in-depth understanding of things that I illnesses and mechanisms of disease and health that I see in everyone every day and that's always fascinating to me to be able to say you know I read about that in the lab, I saw that in the lab and now I understand why it's happening. There's a lot of things that I learned in here that I didn't learn in school or type baking. I didn't really get to do a lot of that during the COVID because everything was online but being able to work in person and work in the lab was very helpful. I thought that coming to THI and doing research in a lab the summer before my first year as an undergraduate would not only be really helpful for me in terms of kind of deciding what my interests are specifically in scientific research but also to form connections and learn a little bit more about the research going on here and about molecular cardiology. McKayla visited us a few years ago through the Make-A-Wish Foundation and her main interest was to follow the cardiac surgeons around that was a real goal at the time and on her final day she had some spare time so she was brought up to the research labs to see what we were doing and so I gave her a brief overview of her projects and we got to one in which my lab actually developed small molecule drugs to enhance various therapies including stem cell therapy done here at Texas Heart but one of the drugs also as we followed the science found that it worked very well in conjunction with immunotherapies for various solid tumor cancers and I just happened to mention to McKayla that you've probably seen commercials for these products, Updivo, Ketruda, et cetera and she just out of the blue said yeah I'm on Updivo so she took a sudden interest in that and I have her working on that project actually on the actual drug that's in clinical trials now. Coming back to the lab and seeing all those new discoveries and seeing how they moved on from the compound I saw three years ago to what they're working on now is just been really exciting. What I work on is very personalized medicine so being able to look up certain mutations and really be able to make those mutations and test certain, test out the mutations and see whether or not drug works or not. I look forward to coming here to work here really. It's just absolutely amazing to be a part of it and I'm so excited for the next breakthrough that will happen in that department and it could happen any day.