By Jade Serna, Outstanding Research Story, UROC 2026.
My introduction to research came when I was accepted into the 2023-2024 El Puente Research Fellowship cohort the summer before my sophomore year at UNM. My interest in research was tentative at that point and the uncertainty stemmed from not knowing where to begin to find my passion and interests in my field. Right before my acceptance into the program, my aunt passed from breast cancer. My desire to contribute to the development of cancer research started from a place of deep personal pain, and that was when I first chose to develop a project that meaningfully approached cancer-related topics.
While I was thinking about my project, I noticed that the film Oppenheimer did very little to adequately address the Indigenous perspective. The Trinity Site encompassed a significant amount of tribal land that was actively in use prior to the project. I was reminded of what I had learned about the burgeoning study of epigenetics and so I sought out information addressing whether New Mexican communities were still affected by the residual ground levels of radiation. I found that cancer rates in the Tularosa Basin downwind of the Trinity Site were typically asserted to be higher than usual. The communities also experience a higher rate of congenital defects, developmental disorders, and a myriad of comorbidities that affect holistic mental and physical health outcomes. Majority of the existing research was able to prove that the environment was negatively impacted by the nuclear testing and mining, and so it was only reasonable to assume that the communities living in that environment and interacting with compromised resources would also be impacted. Once I conceptualized this basic premise, I reached out to Dr. Carmella B. Kahn, Assistant Professor at the College of Population Health. She was my first research mentor and was very supportive and influential in helping me design and propose the implementation of my project.
The future of this project is very important because of its immediate relevancy, as historic Uranium mining sites are being re-opened to resume production of nuclear materials in the United States. Marginalized communities in the southwest benefit from this research and those related because they continue to suffer from limited healthcare opportunities and resources. The present threat of their environment being compromised once again compounds existing and growing concerns about public safety. Advocacy in research and the community is vital to combat legislation in favor of resuming potentially harmful operations on productive and historically significant lands. My research found that there is a present need to combine quantitative and qualitative methods to understand and address the multigenerational trends in predominate health disparities due to sources of historical colonial oppression, environmental trauma, and limited access to health-related resources. The implications of these findings suggested that a mixed-method approach would be most effective in articulating a relationship between all previously individual factors of study. I shared these findings at UNM’s spring 2024 UROC via a poster presentation. The experience of sharing my work through this mode affirmed to me that this presentation was inherently a way to communicate the often exploited and discarded perspectives of the impacted populations in a space where intentional advocacy and collaboration truly matters.
The development of the research proposal for this project is the singular experience that defined my undergraduate experience and personal motivations for continuing to do research. I learned so much about the importance of community participation and striving to do significant work with the opportunities that I am afforded. It re-framed my overall perspective of research as a biological scientist and made it something that can and should be humanistic first. There was a definite transitory period where my project outgrew its limitation of the year that I had with El Puente and became its own tangible narrative. After this experience, I conducted a ten-week research project about the role ER+ receptors play in the progression of breast cancer tumor cell metastasis in bone tissue with the UROC Summer Research Institute at the University of Arizona. This was my first laboratory experience in the field of cancer biology, and what I learned about those research methods and techniques continues to be relevant to my first project. Now, I am a graduating McNair scholar committed to an MS in Tumor Biology program this fall. I never forgot about this project, and the goal to revisit it has stayed with me for my entire research journey. When I do conduct this research again, I want to prioritize community participatory interviews and collect targeted surveys to assess individual holistic health data. Then, I would combine those findings with the collection of relevant biomarkers with consent to assess genetic markers and pathways that align with observed trends in physical health conditions.
The advice that I would give to other undergraduate researchers who are just starting out on their journey is very simple. I encourage all up-and-coming undergraduate student researchers to self-advocate. Give yourself a chance. You are the only person that has the capability to stunt your future growth. There are so many opportunities to do research that you are passionate about at UNM, and so many programs that are there for you and hope that you will apply so that they can help you become the best version of yourself. Apply to them all, see what happens, and when one door closes, just know that another will always open when you put in honest effort. Invest in yourself always, take every opportunity as it comes, appreciate it, and see it through. Even when things get difficult, just remember that your work would not be worth it if you did not struggle at all and challenge yourself to overcome realistic hurdles. Above all else, do not expect that the journey is going to be easy and embrace that the difficulty will benefit your professional and personal growth as a human before anything else. Remember that you have value and that you belong here, and no one can ever really take that away.