Sara Duku

As a diligent and enthusiastic biological science graduate, currently, I am seeking vacancies in testing, research, microbiology, biochemical, haematology or immunology and virology laboratories. Having acquired a great range of transferable skills through 3 years of extensive laboratory experiments at Nottingham Trent University, I am well equipped for a role as a lab assistant, scientists and work in commercial healthcare industries. I am self-motivated, competent, and always eager to learn and develop new skills. Additionally, I am a good team worker. As part of my research project, I succeeded in obtaining the effects of carbamazepine and diazepam in alcohol induced epilepsy to evaluate the efficacy of both drugs for epilepsy which developed my pursue in pharmacology and medical industries. My projects allowed me to design innovative experiments to maximize my results’ accuracy and quantity. For my masters research project I investigated differentially expressed genes in neuroblastoma cells treated with Torin 1 and RapaLink1.

For a year i worked as a microbiology technician at Procter & Gamble. I was responsible for managing microbial susceptibility testing and microbial content testing, coordinating sample receipt, organizing microbial experiments and managing my time between  testing and training, labeling samples, operating Hamilton Starlab liquid handling machines, hightroughput microbial screening, preparing bacterial stock cultures, keeping inventory of chemicals and reagents, organizing lab meetings, creating COSHH forms, adhering to SOPs, experience working in GMP laboratories  

As a Master student studying molecular medicine I obtained numerous molecular techniques: Plasmid DNA isolation and purification, quantitative PCR, agarose gel electrophoresis,  DNA cloning, restriction endonuclease analysis, DNA sequencing and analysis, Escherichia coli (E. coli) transformation, sequencing of target genes and development of general basic microbiological methods, epitope tagging of proteins, protein purification, affinity chromatography, Ion exchange chromatography, size exclusion chromatography, immunoprecipitation, hydrophobic interaction, protein characterization by gel electrophoresis, proteomics: protein identification, sample preparation, and data analysis, LC/MS analysis, SDS-PAGE, Bioinformatics, Harvesting cancer cells, drug treatment, yeast cultivation,  neuroblastoma differentiation, western blotting, RNA sequencing, lifespan assays, cellular phenotyping, protein translation status, gene expression analysis, genetic interaction assays, R software for statistical analysis, RNA-seq analysis, Computational Analysis of large datasets (Big Data), Interpretation of high-throughput biological experiments, Statistics