Biography

Barrett Updegraff enrolled at the University of Tennessee in the fall of 2008, and upon his second semester declared a major in Nutrition. He is currently a senior with projected graduation in May 2012. While enrolled as a full-time student (>12 credit hours/semester), he has worked 15-25 hours/week as a waiter at La Costa, a restaurant in downtown Knoxville from July 2009-September 2011, and currently works at another restaurant, the Crown and Goose 20-25 hours/week. Barrett has interned in Dr. Jason Collier's lab since October of 2010, carrying out various lab duties such as collecting data (through luciferase assays, BCA assays, and RT-PCR experiments), carrying out experiments such as RNA isolation, cDNA synthesis, transformation, restriction digests, Southern blotting and excision, mini-prepping, PCR reactions, and ligation experiments, as well as presented primary data he has collected, analyzed with Microsoft Excel, and disseminated to various audiences. The research in the Collier lab has provided a powerful addendum to the required coursework required by the department of Nutrition. On top of volunteering in the Collier lab, he was granted admission to an Undergraduate Summer Research Internship program in the Summer of 2011 that included a supportive stipend to carry out experiments in the Collier lab with guidance from Dr. Collier and the post-doctoral fellow of the lab, Dr. Susan Burke. Through the Collier lab, Barrett has also worked in a collaborator's lab, lead by Dr. Sean Campagna, from the department of Chemistry, doing mass spectrometry analysis. He has taken on a supplementary course load to augment his education by taking Genetics, Advanced Cell Biology, and Immunology.