Hailey's Project Page

Who: Hello! My name is Hailey (she/her) and I am from Salt Lake City. I am a first-year student at the University of Utah and spent the last year in the ACCESS program. Outside of school, I enjoy spending time in nature and birdwatching.

My scientific interests: I have a strong interest in public health. Since seeing damaging impacts of cardiovascular disease and how grueling treatment can be, I have been driven to investigate ways to prevent this disease and improve treatment. Additionally, public health is so interesting to me because of the complex ways science naturally intersects with other fields and the practical world. 

Academic goals: Through the ACCESS program, I joined the Gagnon lab, and I have loved doing lab work and being around such driven and inspiring people. In addition to research, I am pursuing a double major in biochemistry and political science. I hope that this plan will allow me to have a strong science background and an understanding of the real-world complexities that can make or break public health work.

Career goals: I would like to pursue a career that allows me to integrate scientific research and public health advocacy. With this work, I hope to create impactful research that addresses important health issues and promotes health equity.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, but in some vertebrates cardiac damage is not as fatal. Zebrafish are capable of complete cardiac regeneration. Currently, we have a limited understanding of the mechanisms that distinguish zebrafish from species that cannot regenerate their hearts. To understand these differences, the Gagnon lab conducted single-cell RNA sequencing of hearts from zebrafish and medaka, a similar-sized fish incapable of regeneration. We found that the healthy medaka heart has a large population of B and T lymphocytes that are absent from the zebrafish heart. I hypothesize that differences in resident immune cells in the heart may modulate regenerative capacity. To investigate these differences, I am using fluorescent in situ hybridization with hybridization chain reaction (HCR-FISH) to reveal the spatial distribution of T cells (marked by lck ) with respect to cardiomyocytes (marked by cmlc1 ). My preliminary results do not show a significant difference between HCR-FISH treated samples and my negative controls. As this established protocol should at least reveal the distribution of cardiomyocytes, I began troubleshooting by refining permeabilization, correcting amplification stage errors, improving imaging, and more. I will continue troubleshooting by using verified probes and gill and thymus tissue as a positive control for T cells. In my future studies, I will use cryoinjury and HCR-FISH to assess the spatial redistribution of immune cells after injury. With this research, I hope to develop the understanding of endogenous regenerative capabilities that could potentially be used to elicit cardiac regeneration in humans.

Hailey Hauck Research Poster.pdf Download Hailey Hauck Research Poster.pdf