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Elijah Martin is a second-year graduate student in the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology program at University of California, San Francisco. He works in the laboratory of Dr. Deepak Srivastava at the Gladstone Institutes. Martin studies how the heart forms to try to understand the causes of heart disease in order to develop therapies. In the lab, he grows heart cells in petri dishes, which involves mixing together different chemicals and nutrients to get the cells to grow and develop into a heart. He uses microscopes to track the growth of the cells. Since he was a young child, Martin has wanted to study the heart and he says attending graduate school will help turn his dream into a career.
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