Julia Stockwell

Born and raised in a small farming town in upstate New York, I developed a love for science after taking biology and chemistry in high school. I just recently graduated from Ithaca College and received my Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry, with a minor in Environmental Studies.

For 5 semesters of my undergraduate studies, I was part of an organic chemistry lab studying quorum sensing. Thanks to the Summer Scholars program through Ithaca College, I also spent 10 weeks of the summer before my junior year developing my lab skills, learning more about research, and creating novel small molecule compounds to act as inhibitors of the quorum sensing synthase in gram positive bacteria. It was after this summer that I knew without a doubt that I wanted my career to be in research.

I am a Research Technician in Dr. David Harris’s laboratory at Boston University School of Medicine. Joining the Harris lab has introduced me to protein chemistry and cellular biology in relation to studying neurodegenerative diseases. My current role involves neuronal and glial cell culture maintenance, mouse colony husbandry, and other biochemical assays that assist Ladan Amin on one of her projects – understanding the molecular mechanisms of Aβ receptor systems. Learning about Aβ aggregation, and it’s contributing factors that lead to neurotoxicity, has therapeutic implications in not only prion diseases but Alzheimer’s Disease as well.