Lab Life Video Series: Henrickson Lab

Lab Life Video Series: Henrickson Lab Transcript

0:08

Sarah E. Henrickson, MD, PhD

Hey, I'm Sarah Henrickson. I'm an assistant professor at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

0:12

I studied biochemistry and immunology. I did a PhD at Harvard Medical School, looking at how CD8-T cells get activated in the very earliest stages using imaging techniques, and almost exactly five years ago I opened my lab here at CHOP.

0:28

Here, we study how chronic inflammation whether because of diet and asthma, or because of rare monogenic diseases, how CD8-T cells are affected by those different forces and how we retune those differences to help our patients.

Montana Knight

0:41

If there was one word I would use to describe this team, it would be innovative.

0:45

They're just always working together and coming up with new ideas and feeding off each other really is a great environment to work with.

1:07

Dr. Henrickson

So, I think what really brought me to Philly and really makes me excited to be here now is that, as a human immunologist who sees pediatric patients in the allergy immunology space, there's nowhere else to be that has a bigger community of physician scientists and physicians who take care of these patients and try to learn from our patients. And how to better diagnose and treat those patients.

1:29

So, I think both from the perspective of CHOP as a pediatric institution, as well as our partner institution Penn, there's just an amazing depth of ability to study human immunology in a quantitative way.

1:40

Both through techniques like flow cytometry and transcriptional studies, the wealth of colleagues and techniques that's present on this campus is really unmatched.

1:51

And the patients that we're lucky to get to work with, come here because of the amazing physicians across disciplines. So, I have the honor of working with them as well as with my colleagues.

2:03

I think in general, when someone's deciding to go into a career in science, it's really important to find discovery exciting and to think about what drives you from a content perspective. There's a lot of things that we don't understand on a purely basic science level, on a medical level, but there's only so many questions you can ask in your life.

2:23

And there's only so much time you have to spend. And so really thinking about what you're passionate about, finding a mentor who shares that passion with you but will help you become a better asker of questions, and a better self-critic of the data you get back to help make sure that you find the thing you're passionate about and the thing you want to study.

2:42

Maryia Svirydava, IGG, MD

Sarah, our PI, really cares about her students and proactively looks for opportunities for us and is very kind about the feedback she gives, while at the same time making sure we're doing really good science.

2:57

Dr. Henrickson

From my perspective, being passionate about pediatric patients, being passionate in our particular app about CD8-T cells is really important. And then finding, through trial of different labs, what you're excited about is so fundamental because it takes time, and it can be really slow, and everybody fails along the way.

3:15

In our specific lab, in terms of how we're built as a community, my goal is that everybody feels comfortable helping each other.

3:21

Everybody feels comfortable asking for help. So we try to foster a community that's inclusive, a community that communicates early and often, and that celebrates early and often.

3:30

Because there's enough frustration getting through experiments and getting through days that finding those things like people's birthdays, or a paper, or just an experiment or rotation that went well that we try to get together at least monthly and do something as a group.

3:46

And try to make sure that everyone feels comfortable doing science in their way.

3:50

And teaching us the skills they have in science and where they feel comfortable, the skills they have outside science, that we all know each other's people as well as scientists. While respecting the fact that everyone has a life.

4:00

I have two kids. You know everyone has things in their life that are not their job or not their training, and so making sure that everyone has space to respect those elements of their life.

4:09

And if they wish to share them or don't, to make sure that they have space for all the aspects of their life is really important to me.