My name is Ellen Aboukhatwa and I am a fist year PhD student in Aziz’s lab. My undergraduate
degree focused on clinical sciences where I developed a broad interest in several disease states
affecting humans. Schmidtea mediterranea interests me partly because it represents a potentially
useful in vivo model for furthering our understanding of disease. In particular the impressive
regenerative capacity of the organism is associated with its high neoblast (stem cell) activity, which
in many ways is synonymous with various cancer cell behaviours. I would subsequently like to begin
my research by investigating the validity of Schmidtea mediterranea as a cancer biology model.

Publications

Aboukhatwa, E. (2011) Protease enzymes and cancer metastasis, Oncology News, 6(1), pp. 6-8.