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    Rhiannon A. Champagne, BS

    Medical Student
    Texas A&M Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine

    Rhiannon Champagne, B.S. of Biomedical Science, MD candidate, Texas A&M Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine

    I first became interested in research early in my college career after attending classes at Sam Houston State University (SHSU). My early and ongoing association with one of my current mentors, Dr. Danielle Goodspeed, developed after taking her Introduction to Cell Biology course, and subsequently being invited to become a lab assistant for the same course. This later developed into a research opportunity in Dr. Goodspeed’s lab where I proposed to develop a biosensor to detect urinary tract infections (UTIs), which was the subject of my Honors Thesis1. The project was personally meaningful to me because I was previously a primary caregiver for my mother-in-law, who suffered from severe UTIs while not being able to provide clean catch urine samples. This research has continued on since 2019 and is essentially the seminal project that has fueled my interest in research and experimental design. Over this duration, I was awarded two internal College of Science & Engineering Technology (COSET) grants in the spring and summer of 2021 to fund this endeavor. Currently, at least two publications are in the process of being drafted over the results of this project. I continue to manage the undergraduates in Dr. Goodspeed’s lab. An ongoing impact of this project is that the biosensor compound that I introduced is now being studied as a pesticide for invertebrates, supported by an internal grant.

    After graduating from SHSU, I was accepted into the Texas A&M College of Medicine MD program, and I have continued to seek out meaningful research opportunities. I joined Dr. Farida Sohrabji’s lab located within the Health Science Center of Texas A&M College of Medicine in January of 2024. I was intrigued by her lab being focused on stroke and the gut-brain axis, so I decided to merge my interests with this field of study. First, Dr. Sohrabji and I decided it would be interesting to incubate the compound I’m working to develop into a biosensor to detect differences between archived stroke serum samples, treated samples, and sham samples. These trials have shown promise as there are consistent and significant results. Throughout my time in medical school, I have also grown a passion for vascular biology, abdominal anatomy, and neuroscience, as well as looking at pathophysiology from a multisystem perspective. With these passions in mind, I chose to pursue a research project on the impact of mesenteric ischemia on brain health, which is an understudied health concern. I hope to positively influence the scientific and medical community with the results from this study.

    Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose

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