Rachel Armstrong is from Lexington, Kentucky, but is currently an undergrad at Cornell University. While she was home for the summer, she decided to do work at UK in Ai-Ling Lin’s lab at the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging. “I’m going to be continuing researching with her throughout this year,” says Armstrong. 

“Both of my parents work in the medical fields, so I started volunteering at a hospital at a pretty young age and then volunteered at nursing homes in high school. I’ve seen how Alzheimer’s can affect lives and I think that anything that I can do in the lab that can potentially prevent that from happening to people in the future would really make me happy.”

Armstrong is conducting a research project to give rapamycin, a drug that inhibits part of the Alzheimer’s development process, to diabetic mice to investigate the side effects. “We don’t really know what we’re going to find, but the end goal of the research is to increase people’s quality of life, increase health-span while increasing life-span, and so I think that that’s something that matters to everybody.”

Armstrong and Ai-Ling Lin are featured on LabTV.com. This website features videos with medical researchers who tell where they came from, how they chose their career, what they do each day in the lab, and why they love it. LabTV’s founder, Jay Walker of TEDMED, said he started the site because if high school students can personally identify with a young medical researcher, they are far more likely to consider becoming one. LabTV’s network features researchers working at leading universities, corporations, and the National Institutes of Health.