Emily Wood was destined to attend Wayne State University.

A second-year doctoral candidate in the WSU School of Medicine’s Molecular Biology and Genetics Graduate Program, Wood was born in Detroit’s historic Woodbridge neighborhood, on the western edge of WSU’s campus. She grew up on the city’s east side. Her mother, Mary Jane Heeg, Ph.D., is a crystallographer who retired from WSU’s Department of Chemistry in 2010, and Wood spent her childhood visiting her mother on campus.

“I was born on campus, and I’ve been here ever since,” she joked.

Wood’s first job after high school graduation in 1999 was with WSU. She worked full time as an administrative assistant, using the school’s employee tuition reimbursement program to take one class a semester, mostly at night. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology with departmental and university honors in 2007 – eight years after her first college class.

Anthropology sparked an interest in evolution, and more specifically, the genetics behind it all. “I really wanted to know about human evolution and the relevance of genes,” in human behavior, she said.

Yet when she began independently researching genetics, “I realized I couldn’t read the papers. I just didn’t have the skills set,” she said.

She went back to school, at WSU of course, taking master’s degree courses before joining the doctoral program in 2010, with a computational concentration.

Only two years in, Wood has already received international attention for her computational work on long non-coding ribonucleic acids in the lab of her mentor, Leonard Lipovich, Ph.D., assistant professor of Molecular Medicine and Genetics, and Neurology.

Dr. Lipovich’s determination to prove genetic matter once deemed “junk” has a place in clinical medicine is bringing the School of Medicine to the forefront of a burgeoning niche field of genome enthusiasts in the United States, Asia and Europe. The work could lead to new therapeutics for cancer and other diseases.

“For a second-year Ph.D. student, Emily's activity and meaningful contributions to our international collaborations are absolutely stunning,” Dr. Lipovich said.

LncRNA genes comprise half of human genes. Results from Dr. Lipovich’s lab suggest they play a critical role in regulating the conserved part of the genome. “It’s really on the edge of what’s known,” Wood said.

She has earned membership in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Consortium Analysis Working Group, one of two international research consortiums that succeeded the completion of 2001’s Human Genome Project. Wood implemented both manual and newly-learned automated approaches to analyzing genome-scale LncRNA experimental data from ENCODE Analysis Working Group and another international research consortium called Functional Annotation of the Mammalian Genome, also known as FANTOM5, Dr. Lipovich said.

She regularly presented her results during ENCODE Web conferences, results that earned her the second authorship on a paper in the current September issue of Genome Research titled “Long non-coding RNAs are rarely translated in two human cell lines.”

Even before the publication, Wood’s role in the lab has pushed her into a spotlight beyond her hometown.

“Emily developed and optimized manual annotation protocols to check whether a Gencode transcript was a long non-coding RNA or not; to map specific peptides from mass spectrometry experiments to Gencode lncRNAs; and to analyze the evolutionary conservation and the biological common sense context of the peptide hits. She also did much of the annotation herself,” Dr. Lipovich said. “(Half of the) main figures in the paper directly show Emily's annotation results, an impressive contribution that earned her a prestigious sole second authorship on the paper.”

In less than two years, she has received three scholarships to present her work, and travels at least every other month to talk or present. She was competitively chosen by FANTOM for an expenses-paid trip to the FANTOM5 meeting at the RIKENomics Science Center in Yokohama, Japan, last October. She was one of only 10 students in the world invited to give a 30-minute presentation, and her audience was internationally-renowned geneticists, including Nobel Laureates.

“It was really exciting and it was really scary,” she said.

Dr. Lipovich still gets calls from international scientists “who ask specifically for Emily to analyze their data, mentioning that they cannot forget her October 2011 Yokohama talk,” he said.

Emily began to develop her own dissertation ideas last year. She presented a poster on the presence and genomic structure of LncRNAs at a Cell Symposium in Chicago in 2011, and earlier this year received a prestigious Keystone Symposia Travel Grant to present posters in Snowbird, Utah, 11 years after her mentor received the same honor. She made the same presentation at the 17th Annual Meeting of the RNA Society in Ann Arbor, Mich., this year.

“Emily's enthusiasm, hard work, attention to detail and willingness to learn outside of the comfort zone are unparalleled,” Dr. Lipovich said.

She was appointed to the reviewing editorial board of the journal Frontiers in Non-Coding RNA in 2011.

Wood credits her determination and work ethic to her mother, who raised Emily and her sister Mae on her own. “She’s a world-renowned scientist in her own right,” Wood said.

Dr. Heeg earned an excellent reputation in the science world for pioneering several new methodologies for determining the structure of inorganic compounds, including difficult crystal arrangements. Wood said it was her mother’s positive example that made her realize a career in science was possible.

“I feel really blessed that I found something I really enjoyed,” she said.

Wayne State University School of Medicine student Lizbeth Brice is “extremely grateful” for a $10,000 scholarship from the American Medical Association Foundation.

Brice is one of just 13 medical students in the nation and the only one in Michigan to receive the foundation’s Minority Scholars Award, a distinction that she said is both humbling and overwhelming.

“This money is extremely helpful. One of the biggest stressors for me is the ability to pay back my student loans. Medical school is a big financial investment, so being able to direct this money to decrease my loan burden is very satisfying,” she said.

The third-year student grew up on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. She returned to the United States, her native country, in 1996. She earned a degree in Pharmacy from Howard University in May 2010. Instead of working as a pharmacist, though, she started at WSU that fall, still studying for her pharmacy licensing board at the same time. She passed it, and is a licensed pharmacist.

The Minority Scholars Awards recognize scholastic achievement, financial need and commitment to improving minority health among first- or second-year students in groups defined as historically underrepresented in the medical profession. According to the American Medical Association, 9 percent of U.S. physicians are Hispanic, American Indian, African-American, Alaska Native or Native Hawaiian.

“I think that as the patient population becomes larger and more diverse, cultural competency will become extremely important,” Brice said. “This goes beyond having professionals that represent different races and ethnic groups, but rather making sure that all professionals understand diversity and how to respond to it, with the ultimate goal of improving the patient experience and optimizing patient outcomes.”

She isn’t yet set on any particular medical specialty, but likes the field of Internal Medicine. “I love the idea of following patients long-term and seeing their health improve over time,” she said.

Brice coordinated the WSU Student National Medical Association’s 23rd annual Reach Out to Youth program in February. The free workshop program gives more than 300 Detroit-area children and their parents an inside look at a medical career. She volunteers at the Robert R. Frank Student Run Free Clinic in Detroit and with the Code Blue and Freedom House organizations, providing nutritional and medical information to children and refugees.

“She has excellent people skills and administrative abilities, and is trustworthy. She is destined to make a positive addition to the education and health of the communities that she will serve,” said Silas Norman Jr., M.D., associate dean for Admissions, Diversity and Inclusion.

Sometimes the friends you make can shape the path you take. Perhaps no one knows that better than Angela Sosin, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Wayne State University School of Medicine’s Cancer Biology Graduate Program.

Sosin’s family moved to Macomb Township when she was 8 years old. She made quick friends with three other girls in her new neighborhood. They were inseparable at times, for the next decade, until each went off to different universities. They grew up together, and became part of each other’s families.

“Their parents were, and still are, very much like my own parents,” Sosin said.

As an undergrad, Sosin learned that the mother of one of her friends had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

“Nothing seemed to make any sense, and answers to questions simply led to more questions. I had a hard time grasping how this could happen to someone close to my parents' age,” she said. “I couldn't even imagine losing a parent that wasn't 'old.’”

The Birmingham resident was always inquisitive, she said, so it certainly wasn’t unlike her to question the diagnosis of someone close to her. “I felt that there was always a reason for anything and everything, and can remember frustrating some of my teachers in elementary and middle school by asking so many questions,” she said.

In retrospect, the experience is one that drove her to inevitably get into cancer research, although she didn’t realize it until years later, she said.

Sosin has renewed a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, or T32, training grant from the National Cancer Institute for a second consecutive year. She is one of five Cancer Biology Graduate Program students in the T32 program. The grant for pre-doctoral students is worth more than $22,000 every year. Her dissertation mentor is Ayad Al-Katib, M.D., professor of Internal Medicine, Division of Hematology and Oncology, and her project is titled “Targeting MDM2 for therapeutic intervention in B-cell lymphoma.”

She received a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and molecular genetics from Michigan State University, and was working as a molecular biologist at a contract research company in Wheeling, Ill., before deciding to pursue her doctoral degree. She chose WSU because she was offered some financial support, liked the idea of being near her family and friends, and appreciated its affiliation with the Karmanos Cancer Institute.

“To me, it meant a broad, in-depth multidisciplinary training experience that would extend well beyond the laboratory,” she said.

Sosin developed a strong interest in hematological malignancies -- cancers of the blood, bone marrow and lymph nodes -- during her first year of graduate school. Her research interests now include developmental therapeutics and their translation into clinical relevance.

Jonathan Irish visited his uncle’s physics lab as a child. He helped set up a few basic experiments for fun, and watched a superconductor sample float above a magnet, cooled with liquid nitrogen.

“Seeing it levitate and remain there in front of me, above a bench? That hooked me,” he said.

The visit was only a few hours, but it made a lasting impression. It was his first glance at laboratory science, and he remained fascinated throughout elementary and secondary school thanks to great teachers, he said.

Irish is now a third-year student in the Wayne State University School of Medicine’s Cancer Biology Graduate Program. He’s using the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, or T32 training grant, he secured from the National Cancer Institute to study the role epigenetics play in breast cancer -- in a lab, of course. The grant for pre-doctoral students is worth $22,000 every year.

He is co-mentored by Zengquan Yang, Ph.D., assistant professor of Oncology, and Stephen Ethier, Ph.D., voluntary professor of Oncology.

“My motivation for studying cancer is both humanitarian and personal, although on a personal level, the motivation comes from a natural curiosity in something so complex as the field of cancer research,” Irish said.

The lab he trains in studies oncogenes in breast cancer. Oncogenes are those that cause cancer to become malignant. “It is incredibly interesting, and because it affects most of us, or will at some point in our lives, it is important,” he said.

According to the American Cancer Society, 1,596,670 new cancer cases and 571,950 deaths from cancer were projected in the United State in 2011.

Irish’s project is titled “Epigenetic Mechanisms of Transformation for the NSD3 Oncogene in Human Breast Cancer Cells With the 8p11-p12 Amplicon.” He is driven by studying oncogenes that have not yet been characterized and successfully targeted therapeutically. He said he appreciates that the T32 training grant confirms his questions are a small but important part in the lab’s overall research focus.

“To me, being awarded a position on the training grant was confirmation that someone thinks I can do a good job, coupled with the expectation that I go ahead and get the job done. So, it’s a great motivator for both of those reasons,” Irish said. “To make even a small contribution toward understanding even one type of cancer better, in order to better prevent or treat it, would mean a lot to me.”

Irish, a Lansing native, earned his undergraduate degree from Michigan State University.