Aidan Shea Email & Phone Number

Hello! My name is Aidan, a scientist at the UW's department of laboratory medicine. My work focuses on running and analyzing DNA/RNA extractions, qPCR, and RT-PCR for both research projects and large-scale clinical trials. I also maintain laboratory instruments, prepare and QC reagents, and use excel/python to automate handling of specimen and PCR data. My long-term career goal is to branch into research extending our healthspan by increasing our ability to treat/prevent cancerous, cardiovascular, and insulin-related disease. My motivation is described below.Before entering my junior year of college, I spent a gap year working as an EMT at TriMed Ambulance, responding to 911 calls in King County with local fire departments. My job involved assessing patients, performing medical interventions, and relaying a report to the receiving hospital. I had imagined rescuing patients from sudden, acute traumas and maladies, but this was far from the norm. The vast majority of the patient population consists of people suffering from the chronic disease listed earlier. Those experiencing acute medical emergencies almost invariably had one or several of these diseases as comorbidities. Today, I am convinced the most meaningful impact we can make to human health is to combat these age-related disease categories through scientific study. When I returned to college, I joined the Maly Lab. For the first six months, I worked on the synthesis, purification, and characterization of organic lysine-targeted small molecules to be used as ligands in an assay intended to quantify the potency of kinase inhibitors. I presented on this project at the UW's undergraduate research symposium, and the poster and abstract are featured below. Later on, I also assisted with cell-based experiments for click chemistry optimization and fluorophore comparison using HEK-293 cells. My last experiment as an undergrad demonstrated labeling of hydrazine probes in cells fixed by paraformaldehyde. I discovered my preference for laboratory work here, which, alongside my desire to ameliorate chronic disease, motivate my career trajectory.