User:Brian Estevez

Born and raised in a humble Brooklyn, New York apartment with a traditional Hispanic extended family and being the first of my immediate family to be completing a college degree, it was a new experience for me to be introduced into research symposiums, traveling to meetings, and presenting my own research. I graduated from Queensborough Community College in 2006 with an A.A in Liberal Arts. When I arrived at Queens College I had every intention of getting a bachelor's in education to teach high school science.

I am now a Biology major with interests spanning:Sex differences, Immunology, Developmental and Molecular biology, Stem cell and tissue regenerative therapy biology. My passion to teach has not changed but my road to teaching has changed at bit. Since starting my research about two summers ago I have been to several meetings, symposiums and poster sessions in which I presented my own work. Some of these were; the City Alliance minority poster session in City College, New York City (Nov.2007), three ABRCMS meetings in Anaheim, California (2006), Austin, Texas (2007), and Orlando, Florida (2008), Sex Differences meeting in Washington D.C (2007), International Cell Death Society meeting in Rockefeller Center, New York (2007), and I was honored to be selected to participate in the 2008 Undergraduate research Training Program at Loma Linda University during this past summer. I am currently a NIH-funded MARC scholar. I also participate in the Honors in Math and Natural Sciences program, where we give presentations of our research every semester during the Sigma XI and Undergraduate Research Council poster sessions. These experiences have given me an opportunity to fine tune my presentation skills, and enhance my communication with others outside of my lab and across disciplines. I have learned to cater my research to the audiences’ needs, which should serve me well in my future academic goals.

Our lab has observed that sex hormones are not the source of the differences in cellular sensitivity, but may reduce or exacerbate the dimorphism in severity. A subset of this project has been to look at the regulation of a specific gene, which we have shown to be sexually dimorphic in expression, in the presence and absence of stress or hormonal supplementation. This gene, Cyp7b1, is a member of a family of proteins generally involved in drug and alcohol metabolism. Based on what is known about this gene it seems to be a mediator of steroid hormone metabolism in the cell. Most of my work has been to understand the regulation of this gene with respect to our system. So far, gene expression data tells us this gene is estrogen responsive as well as sex biased at specific developmental stages in our system. In certain tissues the observed sex differences in gene expression are very pronounced, specifically in the brain tissue. Preliminary experiments looking at the effect of estrogen receptor inhibition on Cyp7b1 have verified one of the key players in its regulation. The biological applications for a detailed understanding of such a mechanism and its sex-biased regulation can lead to efficient hormone therapeutic drugs which are gender-specific, as well as better understanding of sex dimorphic diseases.