Research

Through her time at URI, Jewel worked on multiple projects. The Xinyuan Chen Lab focuses on the adjuvant effects of vaccine development. More specifically, the project she worked on took a platform adjuvant which fused the surface of the antigen to the flagellin-hepatitis b core (FH) virus-like particle. This work was published in Zhao, Y. et al. (2022).  Using this platform, she applied the S1 subunit of the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in order to develop a more immunogenetic and safer vaccine. Jewel also previously spent time working in Dr. Rachel Schwartz’s computational biology lab developing an Ixodes genus phylogeny through the SISRS software using whole genome data. Through this lab as well, she worked on the correlation of the FOXP gene subfamily and potential abundances in vocal learning avians versus non-vocal learning avians.

For her Summer 2021 Research Experience, Jewel had the opportunity to study a cell death mechanism of Epstein-Barr Virus infected B cell cancers at Harvard Medical School. She studied the cell death mechanism, Ferroptosis, by utilizing CRISPR/Cas9 as a potential resource for cancer therapy. Her work was also recently published in Burton, E.M. et al (2022).  

Currently, Jewel works as a research technician at Harvard Medical/Boston Children’s Hospital in the Bing Chen Lab focusing on structural biology of HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2.