Two graduate students will present their research at the final Beckman Graduate Student Seminar of the spring 2023 semester: Megan Finnegan, psychology; and Pei-Hsuan Hsieh, bioengineering. The event takes place Wednesday, May 3 at noon in 1005 Beckman Institute and on Zoom.

Register in advance to attend.

Understanding intercellular heterogeneity in tumor microenvironment by infrared spectroscopic imaging

Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

The tumor microenvironment is a heterogenous and interacting system that determines disease progression and patient outcomes in cancer. A hallmark of cancer is the cell-to-cell variation in terms of cell cycle phases and their phenotypes. In the talk, I will introduce two methods to understand the cellular heterogeneity in breast tumor microenvironments in two different aspects, intrinsic and extrinsic to tumor cells. First, we report the development of a method to use infrared imaging to understand cell cycle progression in a 3D organoid model. This study presents an integration of biological and computational approaches to characterize cell phases in tissue-like structures without requiring specific biomarker staining. Second, we report on the synthesis of a drug derivative with dual functions that can be tracked using fluorescence and IR microscopes. The synthesized drug derivative showed distinguishable IR peaks in the bio-silent spectral region, which could differentiate the drug signal from the biological sample. Collectively, this conjugate combines the advantage of the auto-fluorescence from doxorubicin and the strong vibration of the carbonyl groups on the IR label that enables us to track the location and relative quantity of the drug in a high-throughput and non-destructive manner. Together, these studies provide a new avenue to examine intrinsic cell behaviors and their interactions with exogenous agents without the use of labels or dyes.

Pei-Hsuan Hsieh is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Bioengineering working with Rohit Bhargava. Her research mainly focuses on developing novel analytical methods to understand the cell-to-cell variation in the tumor microenvironment by infrared spectroscopic imaging. She is a trainee in the Tissue Microenvironment, or TiME, Training Program, supported by T32 grant from NIH, under Cancer Center at Illinois.

Development of more efficient methods of detecting individual variations of brain response to social exclusion that predict concurrent and future psychopathology

Meg Finnegan

Adolescence is a period of rapid physiological maturation coupled with profound shifts in social roles. During this developmental stage, peer relationships take on a central importance, with exclusion from peer relationships critically linked to the onset of depression, anxiety, and other problems in living. Understanding individual differences in how the brain processes social exclusion and confers risk or resilience from psychopathology has largely focused on comparing response to social exclusion compared to inclusion. This approach employs a naturalistic experimental design – experiments designed to elicit brain response to real-world situations. Naturalistic experiments have shown broad promise for improving neuroimaging test-retest reliability and evidencing stronger associations with markers of psychological well-being; however, they suffer from notable methodological shortcomings. Namely, there is often no clear optimal method for isolating specific portions of an experiment for analysis. In this talk, I will outline new theoretical directions for understanding individual variability in neurophysiological reactions to social exclusion that better reflect the dynamic processes of social exchanges. Furthermore, I will illustrate how making in-roads to understanding the time-resolved nature of social exclusion can provide a novel data-driven approach to temporally parcellating naturalistic experiments, potentially improving their utility in understanding how individuals navigate the complex world of everyday experience and its association with human flourishing.

Megan Finnegan is a dual doctoral student in clinical-community psychology and neuroscience, working with Professors Karen Rudolph and Wendy Heller. Her work broadly focuses on creating new methodologies to understand the mechanisms of cognitive and emotional control, elucidating the utility of the brain in predicting mental health outcomes, and developing more biologically grounded computational frameworks of emotional well-being.

Learn more about Beckman's Graduate Student Seminar Series.

Read Q&As with student researchers on Beckman's Student Researcher Spotlight page.