Out of all the students who have ever attended Auburn University, Jenna Bloomer got to be the first to do something.
Bloemer is the inaugural student to the Auburn pharmacy school’s new dual-degree program and is one of the only three students in the whole program.
Bloemer, who will graduate with her Pharmacy degree in May, will then start working on her PhD, a program she has been in for two years on a limited basis but will start participating in more intensely in the fall.
After finishing the program with a pharmacy degree and a PhD, Bloemer would like to go on to have a career in an academic setting, like a pharmacy school, which would allow her to care for people, but also spend time doing research.
Currently, Bloemer is in the middle of a research project that is working to show the connection between Alzheimer’s Disease and diabetes by conducting test on lab mice.
"My research is about adiponectin which is a hormone that’s produced by the fat cells in our body ... It has a lot of effects on different tissues including the brain which is what we’re most interested in ... What we’ve seen is that in mice that don’t produce the hormone adiponectin, is that they do have some deficits in their behavior and memory and they also have some problems with the communication with the neurons in the brain," Bloemer said.
Bloomer said that by studying these mice, she and her research team hope to find out if adiponectin can have a protective quality on the brain.
“Basically we have these mice, and we can do different behavioral experiments with them that test their memory, so just think of running around in mazes and things of that nature,” Bloomer said. “We also can actually take the brains of these animals and analyze them more closely to kind of see what’s going on in their brains.”
The research project is something that Bloemer will continue to work on, if it goes well, for the next two or three years, as her dissertation project.
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