Campus Connection

Inside Assistant Biology Professor Jenny Klein’s lab at UW-La Crosse, students are trying to answer an age-old question – how can we prevent aging? Klein and her students are looking into how oxidation, part of the process of aging, affects the molecular machines that power muscles. “My part is raising zebrafish and testing how aging influences gene expression,” says senior Dan Rittenhouse. The goal is to understand aging at the cellular level, giving someone else the foundation to discover treatment options. “Aging is under-researched,” explains Klein. “We think of it as a natural part of life, but these debilitating diseases, like heart failure, are only going to become more of a problem as the population gets older.” Klein recently received a $329,169 grant from the National Institute for Health. The money is vital to secure necessary equipment for the research. “One thing we were stuck on is we don’t have a place to hold fish for the lab. We needed fish tanks,” says Rittenhouse. “Having those and better equipment gets better reactions.” Klein is also hoping to use some of that funding to pay the students for their work. Students like Rittenhouse would appreciate that, since he already “sees this as [his] part-time job.”

Working with students

Matt Hoogland, a 2015 graduate in Biochemistry, has returned to campus as a graduate student. He is thankful for the opportunities to do research in a science lab. “It’s the exact stuff I want to do for a career,” he says. Even better, he’s taking in everything he can learn working side by side with a professor, including “picking up little techniques that may not be in the protocol, but are much more efficient.” Hoogland is one of 10 or so students working inside Klein’s lab. He’s also one of the only reasons you’ll find Klein there. “I don’t know if I’d do research without students,” says Klein. “These experiences are where students learn the most and seeing them learn, that’s the joy.”