 We are here at the research symposium with two of our wonderful students, Femi and Hannah, and we're continuing on learning about the wonderful research that Fairfield University students do. So Femi, I'm going to let you take it from here. Tell us a little bit more about your project. So this project is two years in the making. We do our research with Dr. Phelan who's head of the biology department here at Fairfield. She gave us complete control and autonomy over our project to look at something new. So we looked at previous research that was published and found that pomegranates have anti-tumorous effects on different cancer cell lines. So we thought about what that could mean for our personal research. So Dr. Phelan does breast cancer cell research and we started with MCF7s which are cancerous and we contrast that with healthy normal 10 A cells. We isolated a skin called pomegranate seed oil that's found in pomegranates and extracted the penicillic acid that's found in the pomegranate seed oil. Dr. Phelan made various concentrations of that acid for us to treat our MCF7 and 10 A cells with and essentially we were looking at how treating the penicillic acid affects their cell density, viability, apoptosis and what genes they're expressing. Really interesting you guys. So tell me Hannah why breast cancer research is such a huge, huge topic and thing. What inspired you to dive into this project with Femme? Right so in Dr. Phelan's lab she mainly focuses on breast cancer cells so that's the MCF7 line. She also works with leukemia cells but we just thought since the prevalence of breast cancer is so great that this would be something that would be really inspiring for us to do. We studied penicillic acid specifically because I at least knew pomegranates to be a source of polyphenols which have anti-carcinogenic effects so polyphenols are a compound found in pomegranates, coffee, green tea, red wine, dark chocolate and they have antioxidant properties so we wanted to see what this would do to cancer cells and we've seen some really promising results so that's that's been great. Last week we actually went to the American Association for Cancer Research Conference. We received a grant from the Mancini Fund which allowed us to actually travel there which was very generous of them and it was one of the best experiences I've ever I've ever had honestly it's very memorable. Wow so exciting you guys that's really exciting stuff yeah so tell me I mean you've touched so much on the faculty piece of this project and how she let you take a lot of autonomy but I'm sure she was a really big part of the project so tell me a little bit about that mentorship piece between you and the faculty. Oh my gosh well I think the faculty aspect of Fairfield is probably my favorite part especially being in the bio department we're a very close knit family in the bio department honestly I can name so many professors who I have built super personal relationships with Dr. Feelins literally one of our best friends she's been the best mentor ever none of this would have ever been possible without her she's guided us in every step of the way she's given us so much direction and while she has given us that autonomy she's really just led us in the perfect direction and she set us up for a really successful future too. That's awesome so special that me tell me how has it been here at the research symposium today how has your day been going talking with the Fairfield community about all the hard work you put into this project. So as Hannah talked about we went to the American Association for the Cancer Research Conference last week so it's basically sort of like redoing everything we already did so I guess we've had a good practice with it something not really new to us I wasn't really nervous coming down here to talk about the research when you do something for two years you kind of already know what you're doing and how to talk about it so I'll say they have no nerves at all. Absolutely you guys are you guys are old pros at this right so last but certainly not least where do you hope the research goes from here. Well we are the next step is to look at what genes are being expressed in the 10 days the normal cell line we weren't able to do that yet. I think Dr. Feelin's going to do that for us after we graduate and then hopefully she's going to submit an abstract to a journal for us to get published. Really exciting well all of your hard work certainly paid off very impressive job you guys and thanks so much for chatting with us. Thank you so much.