Canary Center SMASH Rising Program Interns

2018 SMASH interns from left: Taylor Nguyen, Agodi Onyeador, Quentin Spikes, and Semhar Teklu.

Taylor Nguyen

"Before starting the internship, working in a lab was something I never had experienced in. Due to my educational standing as an incoming college freshman, going into the internship, I was not experienced in higher level science courses. What I’ve learned and what I am continuing to learn at the Canary Center as I focus on lung cancer research in Dr. Mallick’s lab has provided college level science work to me before I have even started college. I have always been interested in working in the research environment, but was never given the opportunity to do so. At the Canary Center, I know that I could reach out to anyone I walk by in the hallway or in the lab for help on science-related material and would receive it without any hesitation, thus preparing me for college."

Taylor will be majoring in Nutritional Sciences - Physiology & Metabolism at UC Berkeley.


Agodi Onyeador

"My career research interests at the Canary Center at Stanford consists of working on the computational part of non-small cancer lung cells. I have gained more knowledge about the different types of cancers and how they are formed. Moreover, I have learned about, the R programming language and how it can be used to make data frames to identify the different cancers and how much proteins are in the specific type of cancers."

Agodi's intended major is Molecular and Cell Biology and focusing on Pre-Med/Research.


Quentin Spikes

"At the Canary Center I have been working heavily in the computation area regarding Lung Cancer and learning how the coding language "R" functions. Day to day I have dug deep into the subject of lung cancer to find out what makes lung cancer up, how to identify & classify cell lines, and discovering new terminology involving the lung cancer topic. Working with data received from the wet lab to code into dataframes in R has also been a highly anticipated research interest that i will getting into very soon."

Quentin will majoring in Biology in the fall at Louisiana State University.


Semhar Teklu

"I am interested in seeing possible patterns that the computational team may find based on the data we give them from the experimental side. With that said, I am looking forward to understanding the data we produce."

Semhar's major is molecular and cell biology.