Judy Luu is a great lab member. She is skilled in managing up, volunteers her time every week to lab work, and produces quality work.
Judy is incredibly involved on campus in a variety of organizations from the STEM Ambassadors Program where she mentored first year college students, to the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers where she currently serves as President. She knows how to seek out opportunities that will help her grow personally and professionally. Judy’s time in the Vazey lab is a continuation of several years exploring different levels of neuroscience investigation. Judy interned at Biogen in the Summer after Junior year and volunteered in a clinical lab at UMass before joining us to work at the molecular level of neuroscience research.
In her two years in the Vazey lab, Judy has seen an honors thesis project through from beginning to end. Further, Judy created a user-friendly website outlining her thesis work.
When Judy joined the Vazey lab, she came with experience in behavior and focused her sights on cellular and molecular analysis. She has been goal-oriented from the beginning and successfully completed each task required to get to a final product. Judy has developed many lab skills from immunohistochemistry to high throughput image analysis. She has sliced brain tissue on a cryostat, put tissue on slides, stained tissue both on and off slides, analyzed data using software from imageJ to Prism, and presented the data that she collected.
Judy handles the ups and downs of experimentation very well. When it takes years to set up an experiment that the lab has never attempted before, Judy maintains her eagerness to complete it. Even during the pandemic, Judy has been a great communicator and productive lab member, making great progress on her thesis document. When she was not allowed to enter the lab, she continued to analyze data from home and churn out an excellent finished report.
Judy gets along with everyone in lab and does not make waves. I am confident that Judy will be an asset to any work environment due to her thorough research and initiative. We will feel her absence from the lab when she graduates and are sad to see her go despite our excitement for her very bright future.
-Emma Dauster (Mentor in the Vazey lab, UMass Amherst)
Science by Emma Dauster 