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Ishita Shah has, in her own words, a passion for science. Just ask her about Molecular Biology, and as she talks about her research, her experience, and her time at UMBC, it becomes abundantly clear.

"My research is about bacterial transcription activation," she says. "Mainly we study the bacterium E. coli. We study oxidative stress responses and how certain transcription activators work, how they respond to stresses, and then regulate genes that combat superoxide and other oxidative stresses."

As a Ph.D. student in the Molecular and Cell Biology program at UMBC, Shah is co-author of several papers, most recently a 19-page entry published last October in the Journal of Molecular Biology. The main goal of her research, she says, is to explore novel protein-protein interactions between the transcription activator SoxS and RNA polymerase, the enzyme responsible for messenger RNA synthesis. The paper she co-authored with her faculty mentor, Dr. Richard E. Wolf Jr., provides evidence for "pre-recruitment," a new mechanism for regulating gene expression recently proposed by Dr. Wolf and his research group in the UMBC Department of Biological Sciences. "This work might change the way future textbooks write about regulation of bacterial transcription," she says.

Born in India, Shah earned a B.S. in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from Saint Xavier's college in Ahmedabad and an M.S. in Microbiology from the University of Baroda before making the move to UMBC. In 2000 she was accepted into the Molecular and Cell Biology Ph.D. program with a full stipend, allowing her to concentrate on research. "I only paid for the plane ticket," she jokes.

Why travel around the world to UMBC? "You look at what kind of research is going on. In one department I found all this diversity," she says.

“The research fields of the faculty cover a wide spectrum even if only molecular and cell biology is considered,” says Dr. Wolf. “Some faculty like myself, Dr. Lindahl, Dr. Lovett, and Dr. Farabaugh study fundamental problems of gene expression and regulation in different bacteria and yeast. Others study basic problems of developmental biology using molecular, genetic, and cell biological tools in several of the most important model systems, like Dr. Eisenmann in nematodes, Dr. Brewster in Zebrafish, Dr. Blumberg in slime mold, and Dr. Miller with algae, while others like Dr. Rosenberg and Dr. Bieberich study tumor immunology and prostate cancer.”

Because of the wide array of research opportunities, Ph.D. candidates are required to rotate through three different labs within the first two semesters before choosing their dissertation mentor. The rotations and subsequent research in each lab help students make educated decisions about which field they wish to join, something Shah says was a great experience in and of itself. And while the diversity of academic and research programs convinced her to come, she credits hard work and great faculty support for her success.

"When I came here, it was with passion for science," she says, "but when I compare it now with what I had before, it has increased many-fold because of how professional, motivated, and interested everybody is."

Ishita Shah plans to finish her Ph.D. in spring of 2005 and will begin a post-doctoral fellowship at the Hillman Cancer Center at the University of Pittsburg Cancer Institute.