QuadW Missional Internship - Dallas Site Visit

QuadW board members and families meet the Dallas interns and internship director Don Woolley on site in east Dallas.  Please see story below in the Advocate Magazine:

Jakaela Davis needed a change of pace. Four years ago the Alabama native and Tuskegee University student was looking for a new way to serve. As a Christian she had completed mission work before, but she wanted something a little more relationship driven and a little less labor intensive.

“I’m not good with shingles and stuff,” she says.

Davis found a group called QuadW Missional Internship and immediately signed up. They send college students to cities across the country to work for churches. They’ve worked in Mobile, Ala., Kansas City, Kan., Portland Ore., and Pine Bluffs, Ark. Today Davis is the site director for QuadW’s first Dallas based internship with college students from as far away as Michigan. The group is working at three East Dallas churches: Casa Emanu-El United Methodist Church, White Rock United Methodist Church and Owenwood United Methodist Church.

This summer Davis and nine interns will be working at the churches to help them reconnect with their communities. Davis’ job is to keep the interns on point and be the liaison between the churches and QuadW. Whether she’s working as site director or an intern, Davis has kept busy. Her first internship was in Mobile, Ala., where her grandmother lives.

“I thought I’ll be able to see her a lot,” Davis says about the internship. “That never happened. Except for once on the Fourth of July.

She also thought that working so close to home would be easy.

“I didn’t think there would be so much to do, but there was,” she says.

Don Woolley, the founder and national director of QuadW Missional Internship, says the interns are kept engaged by design. So far this summer they have set up a day camp at Casa Emanu-El, helped with vacation bible school at White Rock United Methodist Church and worked with Owenwood to see where they can better connect with the changing community around the church. The day camp at Casa Emanu-El usually has between 20 and 30 children attend every day. “It’s a lot,” Woolley says. “We want to put [the interns] in a place where they’re stretched and a little stressed, because that’s the maximum place of growing, learning and being transformed.”

The interns will complete their three-month internship next month.

STEVE DICKERSON is the Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate editor. Email him at sdickerson@advocatemag.com COPYRIGHT © ADVOCATE MAGAZINE 2015

    Dr. Andy Livingston YIA Project

    Give a big bear hug welcome to Dr. Andy Livingston, QuadW's 2016 Young Investigator through the Conquer Cancer Foundation. He works at MD Anderson Cancer Center, and because of his big heart for teenagers--a sometimes overlooked population--Dr. Livingston has chosen to focus his work on osteosarcoma. YOU ROCK! So happy to have you as the newest member of our team!

    This project focuses on 2 mechanisms of stress response in cancer cells to attempt to predict which patients will respond well to chemotherapy and to potentially enhance responses to current treatment in order to improve patient outcomes.

    When cancer cells are exposed to stressors such as chemotherapy, they can undergo a process called autophagy (from Greek auto-, "self" and phagein, "to eat") which allows for the breakdown and recycling of cellular components to maintain energy and assemble new proteins. In many cases, this self-eating serves as a protective mechanism to resist the effects of chemotherapy and may be responsible for the recurrence of cancer, as well as the spread of tumor to distant organs. However, when this cellular cannibalism is driven to the extreme, it can lead to cancer cell death. This dual role has been termed the “autophagy paradox” in cancer. Because autophagy can lead to either cancer cell survival or cell death, it has been challenging to find the best way to target autophagy in order to improve responses to conventional chemotherapy.

    The heat-shock family of proteins (HSPs) is part of another protective mechanism for cells when exposed to stressors in their environment. HSPs are produced by cells (both cancer cells and normal cells) in response to exposure to stressful conditions such as lack of nutrition, low oxygen levels, and cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation. HSPs help with refolding and repair of cellular proteins damaged by stress and have similarly been shown to be a mechanism of resistance to chemotherapy in many types of cancer. Recently, we have identified one specific heat-shock protein (HSP27) that appears to predict the role of autophagy in osteosarcoma cells. When exposed to chemotherapy, osteosarcoma cells can either increase or decrease levels of HSP27. When HSP27 is increased, autophagy promotes cell survival, and subsequently leads to decreased sensitivity to chemotherapy. Conversely, when it is decreased, these cancer cells are more sensitive to the effects of chemotherapy.

    In this project, we are examining the interaction of HSP27 and autophagy in osteosarcoma cells. In addition, we will test novel treatments to inhibit either autophagy or heat-shock proteins to determine if they can improve the efficacy of chemotherapy. We are also analyzing osteosarcoma patient samples to better understand the relationship between HSPs, autophagy, and response to pre-operative chemotherapy. We hope this work will ultimately lead to new treatment strategies that can be added to current chemotherapy.

    Plan II Scholarship Recipients

    How many ways can you say hello to some of our The University of Texas at Austin ‪‎PLAN II‬ scholarship recipients. Elizabeth had the pleasure of hanging with them on Tuesday. Singapore, Cambridge, Hong Kong, London, Barcelona...these kids are taking over the world! Study abroad internships, research in labs, researching Shakespeare, finance, real estate WHAT? ‪Education‬ how it should be! ‪‎HOOK'EM‬!