• Jennifer Olson's profile

    I'm female and 34

    • What I do

      I am a medical and science writer for the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC. I assist in preparing manuscripts, animal and clinical protocols, grants, and just about any other piece of written communication that leaves the institute (including press releases).

      Our mission at WFIRM is to develop methods to restore function when organs are damaged – our work often sounds like science fiction, as we develop ways to “grow” biocompatible organs in the laboratory. In fact, our fearless leader, Dr. Anthony Atala, has actually created bladders from autologous (self) cells and then implanted them into patients that had damaged bladders – the patients are doing fine and the bladders are functioning. Check out the newscasts announcing our recent award from the Department of Defense to see a layman’s version of our research.

    • Affiliations

      Current

      Past

    • Interests

      Of course, regenerative medicine and tissue engineering technologies! However, when I worked at the bench (in graduate school and postdoctoral studies), I studied how radiation affected normal brain tissue in order to develop new, safer methods of delivering radiation therapy to brain tumors. I am still interested in this area – in particular, I am interested in how pro-inflammatory cytokines and other mediators of the immune system may be involved in these processes. When I was a grad student, I discovered that, contrary to popular belief, tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alpha actually had a neuroprotective role in the brain after radiation when it signaled through the TNF receptor 2. Cool beans!!!

    • Projects

      Too many to count!

    • Publications

      Jennifer Olson has listed no publications on Nature Network.

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