LU student assists in finding cure for skin cancer

Glavin worked alongside a National Cancer Institute researcher

LYNCHBURG – One Liberty University student brings the school's spirit to the heart of our nation's capital and contributes to potential ground-breaking research in cancer treatment.
     
Liberty University senior Rachael Glavin is a biopsychology major at the university.
She was one of 34 students interning through the Washington Fellowship program.

Glavin worked alongside a National Cancer Institute researcher to study the effects of different medications and molecules on the tumor cells of a specific type of skin cancer, Liberty University officials said.

“It was so amazing and such fulfilling work,” Glavin said. “At the end of every day and week, and now, at the end of the semester, I can look back and say, ‘These are all the things that I have done — I did this, I accomplished this.’ And it’s so cool knowing that what I did could really help someone.”

It was that aspect of her job — being able to tangibly help people in need — that she said she enjoyed most about the internship, and it is has made her recently consider medical research as a long-term career. Glavin was able to meet and talk to skin cancer patients. She said it was a huge wake-up call to the kind of impact that medical research can make.

“I think when you’re an undergraduate student and you want to help people, everyone ends up saying, ‘You should be a doctor,’” Glavin said. “People have tended to think that research cannot directly help people. But with this internship, I wasn’t just helping people, I was trying to help out someone like ‘Mr. Smith,’ who I see every other week.”

Following her internship at the NIH, Glavin said that she hopes to present some of the findings of her skin cancer research at a conference in the spring.
 


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