12/8/2022 Bethan Owen
Bioengineering graduate student Jackson Winter was recently awarded the Paul D. Doolen Graduate Scholarship for the Study of Aging.
Written by Bethan Owen
Bioengineering graduate student Jackson Winter was recently awarded the Paul D. Doolen Graduate Scholarship for the Study of Aging.
This scholarship is designed to reward exceptional graduate students who are making strides in the field of aging. Jackson, who goes by Jake, is now a sixth-year PhD student in professor Pablo Perez-Pinera’s lab. He has spent his academic career with UIUC’s Bioengineering Department, starting as an undergraduate in 2012, and the Doolen scholarship is an indicator of the impressive work he has done during his time in the department.
Jake found himself drawn to study aging partly because of its universal nature.
“Aging is something that’s applicable to everybody,” said Jake. “It’s not like a rare disease, where you have a one in 5,000 chance of contracting it. Aging is literally the process that we see everybody go through. Most of us will die of some disease that is related to aging.”
A good diet and exercise can slightly prolong someone’s life, Jake said, but it’s advancements in fields like gene editing that are more likely to have a dramatic effect on the human lifespan. Jake’s work focuses on how gene editing can improve people’s standard of living as they age by using CRISPR base-editing technologies to target diseases like Parkinson’s that disproportionately affect the elderly.
“The advent of these powerful gene editing tools gives us a lot of opportunity to treat diseases that previously would not be able to be addressed at the molecular level,” Jake said. “We can use these CRISPR-based tools to very precisely alter the DNA bases in living cells. Now the next step is identifying what we can use them for.”
Jake hopes his research leads to discovering a cure for Parkinson’s Disease at the molecular level, in part because gene editing as a treatment for Parkinson’s has been relatively unexplored.
“One of my goals is opening the door to understand how we can use gene editing to treat Parkinson's disease. This approach hasn't really been considered for that specific disease very much,” said Jake. “There are some obvious disease targets that can be treated with gene editing such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis, but using these tools to treat or prevent Parkinson’s is largely unexplored and more off the beaten path.”
After graduation Jake will pursue a career in industry, where he wants to continue working with gene editing or gene therapy. As he considered his BIOE experience and the people he’d worked with along the way, a few specific names came to mind.
“I would just like to shout out Pablo, for being an excellent mentor, and our lab coordinator Wendy Woods, who helped me out in my early days,” said Jake. “Those two have helped me a lot along the way. They’ve both always been very supportive of me.”