Analyzing Senescence in Skin

What biomedical issue did you address in your research, and what did your studies find?

The aim of my Ph.D. was to determine the role of cellular senescence in human skin aging and chronic wounds. Cellular senescence is a cell state that occurs when cells are damaged and can no longer proliferate or function normally. My work is focused on developing tools and strategies to analyze genes and proteins that differentiate senescent cells from normal skin cells. In particular, I studied a human skin-specific gene set for cellular senescence that my research team and I had identified. My bioinformatic analysis allows us to understand how senescent cells contribute to skin aging or disrupt normal healing in chronic wounds.

In normal skin aging, we found that senescent cells increased with sun exposure in the skin. This increase was related to abnormalities in skin pigmentation and decreased collagen and elastic fiber accumulation. We also found that senescent skin cells change with time, and looking at them spatially, we saw that they tend to cluster with each other. In chronic wounds,  we observed that the number of senescent cells can be used to predict how long a chronic wound takes to heal. By looking at how genes interact with each other, we hypothesize that senescent cells could be affecting immune responses in chronic wounds.

What aspects of Mayo's culture helped you grow as a scientist and as a thinker?

I am an M.D.-Ph.D. student in Mayo Clinic's Medical Scientist Training Program. Mayo Clinic is a unique place to do research because of the access and proximity students have to medicine and patients. Interacting with patients during my Ph.D. helped me to more fully grasp the motivation and significance of our work and to focus our efforts on questions that have the most potential to impact patients.

What's next?

My Ph.D. training at Mayo Clinic has not only trained me to conduct excellent science but also has prepared me holistically for an academic career in research, including in grant writing, scientific communication and community engagement. After finishing the M.D. portion of my M.D.-Ph.D., I hope to become a physician-scientist, continuing to answer questions that emerged in my Ph.D. research as well as additional questions that will arise in my clinical training and practice.