Intern Spotlight
Lucy Connolly
Lucy is currently an undergraduate student at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is going into her senior year and is working towards earning her Bachelor of Science in Public Health with a minor in biology. She has always been passionate about the relationship between nutrition and health and hopes to turn that passion into a career. Lucy has dreams of becoming involved in nutritional epidemiology to study the causes and solutions to the many nutrition-related disorders that impact our world today. She strives to uphold a healthy lifestyle by making good nutrition and exercise a central part of her life every day.
Padydeh Doroodchi
Padydeh, also known to her friends as Pady, is a junior transfer student from University of Wisconsin- Madison, now attending UNC- Charlotte. Her current major is pre-public health and is applying to the public health program this semester. While at UW-Madison she worked in a veterinary lab for one year under Dr. Robert Lipinski. Most of her work involved taking photos with a high powered microscope of mice to track cranial/oral malformations, specifically cleft lip/palate and holoenprosensephely. The study focused on specific types of teratogens that are in the environment and how they can influence developing cranial/oral malformations in offspring. She is excited to work at the Cheatham lab because of its focus on nutrition and how it can affect brain development.
Anna Silver
Anna graduated as valedictorian from Northwest Cabarrus High School, where she was very involved in athletics, community service, and student government. She will be attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the honors program this fall. She plans to major in biology and then continue on to medical school. She has always found the neuroscience aspect of biology particularly interesting, so she is intrigued by the studies in the Cheatham Nutrition and Cognition Lab.
Kierra Simmons
This past semester we asked Kierra Simmons, a graduating senior from A.L. Brown, to design a toy that can be used in our lab as part of a study for children. The idea is that the toy will have three steps. The researcher will show the child each step and ask the child to complete the steps as they are shown. Kierra had this to say about her time with the lab, “This internship took me back to my pre-school days. Imagining what I, as a small child, enjoyed about my favorite toys. The design that I chose was a toy that has a button that is pressed to release a sliding slab and on that slab will be a picture. Unfortunately, my design had minor malfunctions and needed more work than expected. As a perfectionist, this taught me that as an engineer I will not always have a design that works perfectly the first time. Even with that little hiccup, I loved my experience with the Cheatham Lab, and it will be something that I will remember forever. “
Kalei Woodford
Kalei is currently a senior at Lake Norman Charter High School where she is involved in clubs like history and photography. She hopes to be admitted to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She plans on majoring in psychology, history or criminal justice and continue to graduate school. She has always been interested in psychology and how it relates to biology, which makes the studies of the Cheatham lab particularly interesting to her.