Hello, my name is Amanda Lund, and I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Dermatology. What I like best about working at NYU is really the community. We're a very close-knit group. Every day we come in, we talk about a lot of science. It's this very iterative, dynamic sort of interactive environment that is just a lot of fun to be a part of PhD students and technicians, everybody's at a different stage in their career. And so you have a lot of peer mentoring, as well as direct interactions with me individually and as a group that help us be creative together.

The cancer type that we study primarily is melanoma. And you know, over the last decade, clinically, we've made tremendous strides in melanoma care and had a lot of successes. But what we've learned is that not all patients are the same. And so what my lab has really focused on is understanding some of those pieces of our biology that might limit the efficacy of these therapies, so that we can down the road think about improving patient care.

And the majority of the projects in my lab are really focused on using experimental models to investigate how the immune system works. And then what's really unique and exciting about being here at NYU is we get to take those things that we learned in our experimental systems, and work together with clinicians to ask whether those things remain true in human tissues and in human disease. We're getting, for example, samples of both the tumor as well as a lymph node, for example, from patients, where we can now actually do imaging and other transcriptomic approaches to use the human system to inform what we do in our experiments, and vice versa. And so that's a really exciting area for us moving forward.

Every student who joins any PhD program comes from a different set of experiences. So one of the first things that I have to do is sort of figure out, "What can this person really bring and where can they grow?" And so it's a lot of fun when you see people really begin to excel, really begin to find the scientific questions that get them excited, begin to see the career path we formed. I had my first graduate student sort of take that whole progression is a postdoc at Genentech. And it's really fun to talk to him even now and learn about what he's doing and how, you know, his career continues to evolve. That's a really wonderful part of this job. And I think that our impact as scientists is as much the people that we mentor as it is the papers that we publish.