Inside UPWr’s Doctoral School – Beatriz Hernández Suárez

Beatriz is originally from Tenerife, the most beautiful island among the Canary Islands, according to her. She came to Poland to continue her scientific career on the invitation of her now supervisor, Aleksandra Pawlak from UPWr's Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. Professor Pawlak contacted Beatriz and told her about the new PhD program, after meeting her in Tenerife, when Beatriz had just obtained her master's degree under the supervision of proffesor David Gillespie, her now second supervisor.

– I chose the University of Environmental and Life Sciences Doctoral School thanks to my supervisor, Aleksandra Pawlak. I had known her previously to her contacting me with this opportunity to study in Wrocław, from a project we both worked on. It was going to be a new PhD program, and she suggested that she could be my supervisor along with professor David Gillespie, who already had been my supervisor once before. It sounded like a good idea to me, so I decided to go for it. At the beginning I wasn’t very optimistic that I would get accepted, because my CV wasn't the best, however, in the end I was lucky enough to get in – says Beatriz, who is now part of two projects at the university – project NAWA and NCBR.

Hernández Suárez first discovered her interest in molecular biology in high school, when she was a teenager. She had just learned about Lamarck and his theory on giraffes, how their long necks evolved as generation after generation reached for ever higher leaves, and about Mendel’s experiments on pea plants to find out how genetic traits are passed down. – When I was a child I wanted to be a veterinarian, because I loved animals, but later on in life, I discovered I was more interested in laboratory work, so I started studying biology. In my second year I learned more about genetics and realised that was the direction I wanted to go in – she said.

The subject of her PhD is to find new targets for anticancer therapy. – We are researching targets in two of the most important systems in the cell, which are the DNA damage repair system and the unfolding protein response system. These two systems are involved when the cells suffer any kind of distress, such as DNA damage caused, for example, by ultraviolet light, which makes your cells mutate and produce changes, or endoplasmic reticulum stress which also negatively influences the proteins produced in your cells. When these proteins don’t work properly you can develop cancer, since the cell doesn’t die but produces more unhealthy cells instead, which can turn into a tumor. We want to see if these proteins have something we can use as targets for new therapies. Our studies are focused on cancer cells from dogs, mainly, however at the last stage of my PhD, we would like to use samples from cancer patients.– Beatriz explains.

Beatriz says that during her doctoral studies she won't be able develop any drugs that could be easily commercialised, since there are many steps between research and the production of medicine, however, she hopes to find something that will contribute to finding new targets that could be used to develop different kinds of drugs for cancer in the future. Finding novel targets for anticancer treatments is a step forward from conventional chemotherapy which targets both cancerous and noncancerous cells.

In the future, Beatriz would like to work for the World Health Organization, particularly for the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is located in France. – I would love to work for the WHO because I truly believe in their mission to improve the wellbeing of people around the world. All their databases are free and public, which is how science should work. It should be accessible to anyone, and the WHO supports organizations from across the world in order to spread knowledge and prevent certain parties from keeping findings to themselves.

Professor Aleksandra Pawlak from UPWr’s Doctoral School, along with professor David Gillespie are helping Beatriz to achieve her goal, by supervising her PhD and mentoring her. When asked about professor Gillespie, Beatriz said – He’s the most amazing scientist I’ve ever met. He’s super smart, super nice and really patient. He was a real mentor to me and taught me everything that I know today. He also supported me by believing in me more than I did myself. He would leave me alone in the lab to be responsible for everything while going away to conferences and congresses, knowing that I’d be ok.

As mentioned before, she met her other superviser, professor Aleksandra Pawlak in Tenerife as well. – After I got my master’s degree David decided to hire me for 5 months to help him with a project and Aleksandra was working on it too. She is super nice and what amazed me about her the most, was that she was super young and still able to work in a clinic as a veterinarian and also conduct research at the same time – says Beatriz. This was when Beatriz discovered that her work would slightly align with her childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian, as these types of molecular studies are carried out on animal cells, obtained from cats and dogs. It turns out humans and dogs, for example, share a lot of DNA. – Most things that can be discovered in a dog will probably be applicable to a human – Beatriz explains. 

After her doctoral studies at the University of Environmental and Life Sciences, Beatriz would like to land a postdoctoral researcher position, to continue her scientific career in molecular biology.

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