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Nisha Broodie
Nisha Broodie was a sophomore at the University of Miami in 2004 when her mother lost a battle with breast cancer. Already fascinated by science, Broodie said her mother's death helped focus her interest in biology.
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Nisha Broodie
University of Miami
Miami, FL
Photo: Matthew Septimus
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In the summer of 2004, just six months after her mother's death, Broodie participated in HHMI's Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which offers research experiences for disadvantaged and minority undergraduates. Under the tutelage of Li-Huei Tsai, an HHMI investigator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Broodie found evidence implicating DNA damage in the progression of human neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.
According to Tsai, Broodie took on the development of a fairly complicated technique for measuring DNA strand breaks. "Through extensive trial and error, she was able to optimize the technique and use it to obtain important data," Tsai said. Broodie became a coauthor on a paper that resulted from the project.
Postponing graduation for a year, she sought to expand her horizons by working at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, as a research assistant. She did her research in the lab of William C. Earnshaw, a professor in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology who studies the roles of chromosomal proteins in cell division and cell death. "When I entered college," Broodie said, "I thought I'd spend three years as an undergrad, and then go straight into medical school. In retrospect, I see how dull my life would have been had I decided to do that."
While she was in Europe, Broodie added more than a little excitement by traveling on her own to cities such as Dublin and Barcelona. She returned to the United States to participate in a summer undergraduate research program at the National Institutes of Health and studied mammary biology and tumorigenesis in the laboratory of staff scientist Caterina Bianco at the National Cancer Institute.
Broodie thinks the self-confidence she gained by navigating foreign countries on her own will serve her well as a researcher. "In addition, I gained a sense of adventure and courage, which I believe is a necessary quality of scientists who engage in novel research," she said. This summer, after completing a semester as an exchange student at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, she plans to graduate from the University of Miami. She will then return to the United States for graduate school.
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