Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

Christie Eyler graduated from Duke in 2005.  The following interview with her and Dr. Telen was conducted in spring 2005 while Christie was well into her first year of medical school at Duke. 

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“The research experience taught me everything,” says Christine Eyler, a 2001 Howard Hughes Research Fellow, is currently in the MD/PhD program at Duke Medical School. As a Howard Hughes Research Fellow, Christie worked with Dr. Marilyn Telen, Wellcome Professor of Medicine, chief of the Division of Hematology, Department of Medicine, and Director of the Duke Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center. 

Christie came to Duke with an interest in chemistry and possibly a research career in a biomedical field. When she heard about the Research Fellows Program during her first year, she thought that the program might be a good fit with her interests. Dr. Telen's work focuses on the role of red cell adhesion in the pathophysiology of sickle cell disease, as well as the identification of genetic polymorphisms that affect the symptoms of patients with sickle cell disease, especially those polymorphisms involving adhesion molecules, the coagulation pathway, and inflammatory responses. As Christie recounts, “I didn't know much when I started in the lab. I had basic molecular biology in Bio 25 and organic chemistry. I knew how to make buffers, I knew the basics about sickle cell disease, but I had a lot to learn.” And learn she did, so well, in fact, that she continued her research in Dr. Telen's lab for the next three years and continues to work with her on publications.

Indeed, it was a good match for both of them. Marilyn Telen is one of the program's most experienced mentors, having worked with 13 Research Fellows in the 14 years of the program. Dr. Telen recalls that when she was first asked to mentor a Research Fellow in 1991, her thought was, “Why not?” As she soon discovered, “It turned out to be fun on a whole lot of levels. The students really do contribute, first of all, so it is a good deal.” And she also discovered that it was an opportunity to bring in someone to her lab who could potentially work there for several years. Like Christie, at least half of Telen's Research Fellows continued in her lab after the end of the program. And finally, Telen says, “I also have to say that I really enjoy having undergraduates around on a personal level. It's why I'm at a university. I enjoy the relationships and I enjoy watching students grow and hearing from them after they graduate.”

Christie's experience in the Telen lab illustrates this growth. Dr. Telen recounts that Christie's early work “was a good example of a project that in many respects failed to achieve its aim, but it still got her to work with the principles, ideas and goals that we were dealing with. Planning a summer research experience for a student is difficult. You don't want to teach them only techniques, but you do want techniques to lead to data and results within the summer timeframe. It's no longer the chemistry lab or the biology lab, where, if you follow the directions and don't mess up, you get the A because you've got the results you're expecting to get. In research, expectations are defined a little differently because you don't necessarily know what the answers are going to be.”

Christie concurred: “I think that's what I learned the first summer, that it's not necessarily a clear path. When I learned the first protocol, I thought, why am I using this method to get the answer to this question? Then I started to realize that sometimes you use different ways to get around a problem. Although that part of the project didn't really work, that was an introduction to that concept, which you don't see very often in high school.”

Following that first summer, Christie continued to work in the Telen lab through graduation. As she explains, “My experience as a Research Fellow confirmed that I wanted to do research. Even after that summer where I first experienced problems with techniques and things not working, it wasn't totally frustrating; I still wanted to do more, and so I stayed on in the lab. It confirmed the Ph.D. part and it also continued to make me think that these were medical problems we were dealing with and that interested me as well, so by the end of my sophomore year I was pretty convinced I wanted to do the MD/PhD.”

Dr. Telen is clearly proud of her student: “We're still working on papers. So far Christie is a co-author of a paper that came out this year in the American Journal of Hematology . There's also a paper in preparation that is a really interesting study on the effect of genetic polymorphisms on sickle cell adhesion, and Christie has had a major role in that. And then Christie tackled and wrote, in incredible fashion, a review of one of the major red cell adhesion molecules that she studied while she was in the lab, and it's just a beautiful review. Christie did the literature review, started writing and produced a really good, thorough paper with everything in it. It's as good as anything I could have gotten a Hematology Fellow to write. The editor of Transfusion has expressed interest in it.”

As an MD/PhD candidate, Christie is looking forward to continuing the research career that was launched with the Research Fellows Program, and Marilyn Telen is looking forward to a new Research Fellow joining her lab.