After watching her family battle cancer caused by uranium dust, recent
“My grandparents worked in the mines, came home hugged everybody with the uranium dust on them, so they developed mutations. ... A lot of my aunts and a couple of my cousins have gotten ovarian cancer and different types of cancer,” she said.
So, she was drawn to preliminary research at FLC focused on metal-containing compounds that could lead to new anti-cancer drugs.
Now that she has finished her majors in cellular and molecular biology and biochemistry, she will attend Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to pursue a doctorate degree in cellular and molecular medicine and plans to continue working on cancer research.
“I feel like it will come to a close very soon, and I think it would be fun to help finish up that field of research,” she said.
She got started in cancer research working for Assistant Chemistry Professor Aimee Morris in 2013. Morris is exploring new compounds using cobalt which could possibly be used in medications that would destroy cancer cells, while leaving the healthy cells intact.
The cobalt compounds are meant to target cancerous cells because those cells are a low-oxygen environment. A small amount of cobalt exists in the human body already, so it may not cause harm.
Joe did the majority of the work on one of these compounds, and it will be tested on cells soon.
“Natalie has by far made the most progress,” Morris said.
To help fund her work, Joe received a Maximizing Access to Research Careers grant through the National Institute of Health.
This summer, Joe stepped away from this research, to prepare to move to Maryland and to apply to the research labs at Johns Hopkins.
“I think Natalie has a very high potential to do extremely well,” Morris said.
Joe excelled academically early in school. As a second-grader in Red Valley, Arizona, her teachers wanted her to skip to fifth grade. But instead her mom transferred her to public school in Farmington, where she was placed in a gifted program in third grade and exposed to the sciences.
“I didn’t really know you could be a scientist for a career, I saw it on TV and movies, but I didn’t know you could do those types of things when I was younger,” she said.
At Farmington High School, Melanie Baker’s focus on creative experiments inspired Joe to shift away from an engineering degree.
Education was also emphasized at home. Her grandparents and her mom struggled with English, and so they made sure Joe and her brother could speak it well.
While she is the first person in her family to progress directly through high school and college to a doctorate program, her parents have both succeeded professionally.
Her mom, Jeanette Joe, is the operations supervisor of operations and maintenance at Navajo Agricultural Products Industry and her dad, Douglas Joe, is the delegated director of criminal investigations on the Navajo Nation.
The main message from her family was always “education is the only way you can succeed in this world.”
mshinn@durangoherald.com
