Technician
I’m Megan, a research tech in the Anakk Lab. I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016 with an Honors Concentration in Molecular and Cellular Biology. I’ve been with the Anakk Lab since its very first days, and enjoyed my time so much that I decided to stay! Upon joining the lab, I was immediately drawn to the FXR/SHP double-knockout (DKO) mouse model–particularly how the females are protected against developing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Clinically, it is well known that females develop HCC at a much lower rate than men, thus poising us to tease apart female-specific molecular mechanisms of protection in our model.
Outside of research, I’m a big fan of eating, learning new songs on the ukulele, reading anything I can get my hands on, and spending time with my cat and dog (which is really cuddling with one, while the other looks on jealously—they’re frenemies).