When the Graduate Student Association representative in Biomedical Physics asked Jennifer Daigle if she had any suggestions for the department, it seemed like a golden opportunity. Jennifer had noticed that the program wasn't providing graduate students with much information about the process of writing for publication.

"As a scientist, you're always going to have to write," she says. "It's part of your career, and you need to know what to do." Graduate students from other universities told her about seminars they had attended on publishing. So Jennifer asked her GSA representative to suggest developing a class for the department's first-year graduate students. She also told her adviser, William McBride, who thought the idea was so good he supported the GSA proposal at a faculty meeting.

The plan was approved, and Professor McBride enlisted Jennifer's cooperation in designing the class. The seminar was presented for the first time in Fall 2000. "It was very well-received," Jennifer says. "Students were very appreciative."

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is that Jennifer had nothing to gain from her suggestion. She was already presenting conference papers and publishing journal articles. There were a couple of reasons for her early success in publishing.

First, as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she had been co-author of a paper about neutron activation analysis. "I didn't go through all the rigorous publishing stages," Jennifer says, "but I did have a hand in it, and I did write some of it.

Her second break came when Professor McBride became her adviser. After taking his Introduction to Radiation Biology class her first year at UCLA, Jennifer requested a rotation in his lab, "and I just never left." Professor McBride was a big help when she got interested in making conference presentations. "The first time I found myself writing an abstract and a paper, he gave me examples from the conference proceedings of the previous year," she says. "I looked at how they were set up, and then I wrote mine and I showed it to him for his comments."

Based on that first abstract, she was accepted to present a paper before the American Association for Cancer Research. Jennifer's subject was research on tumor necrosis factor, or TNF alpha, a molecular messenger produced by the immune system to help cells communicate with one another.

A graduate student who preceded Jennifer in Professor McBride's lab had discovered that TNF-alpha levels increased in the brain after exposure to radiation. Picking up that research, Jennifer looked to see if TNF-alpha, which causes inflammation in other places-for example, your nose when you have a cold-was involved in the dangerous side effects radiation therapy can have on normal brain cells. She found that when it binds specifically to one of its two receptors on brain cells, TNF-alpha can make the cell less sensitive to radiation.

"If you could exploit that finding, you might be able to create a drug or antibody that would make normal brain tissue less sensitive to radiation. Then you could give a higher radiation dose during therapy to kill the tumor, without worrying so much about damaging normal tissue," Jennifer explains.

Her findings have been disseminated in several conference presentations and co-authored journal articles, including papers to be published in Radiation Research and Cancer Research. She also worked with Professors McBride and Rodney Withers on a chapter for a textbook on radiation therapy and the central nervous system, Biological Principles of Radiotherapy in the Central Nervous System.

The process of preparing papers for publication has had many benefits. Writing about her findings helps Jennifer clarify her ideas and get them in order, she says. "I know what I'm trying to do, but having to explain it to other people makes me realize where my research is weak. If I can't explain it, I have to work on it more." Working with others, Jennifer has learned how useful having an editor can be for "situations when you've read your own work too often to realize a sentence may not even have a verb."

And there will be more tangible rewards. "Jen has gained considerable recognition for herself, for the lab, and for UCLA," says Professor McBride. "She has used these avenues to put herself in a strong competitive position for a good postdoctoral experience."

With her dissertation complete, Jennifer is already accepted for a postdoc at UCLA to finish up some ongoing research. She is looking at East Coast universities such as Harvard for another postdoc appointment and already has an offer from the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, "one of the best places you can go" to study radiation oncology.

Her ultimate destination is still undecided, although she likes the road she's taken so far. At MIT, Jennifer was a nuclear engineering major, drawn to the subject by a science project she did on nuclear power in the sixth grade. Then, thanks to another childhood influence-"I fell down a lot as a kid because I was a tomboy, so I was always getting X-rays and I wanted to know what they were all about"-she specialized in radiation medicine, which brought her to UCLA.

Jennifer feels "well-prepared to become a professor or to work for a biotech firm," an option she's considering. "That's where the money is," she notes, but the tangibles won't determine her choice. "I always wanted to do something for a career that I would be willing to do for free," she says. "This is something I would do for free."

Published in Winter 2001, Graduate Quarterly