This past Rose Cafe, GRF Tyler Moeller came to present about vaccines and the engineering process for them that he concentrates his research in. I was very excited to hear we would be having a STEM speaker at one of the cafes since we usually have more speakers in the social sciences. It was very interesting to hear about vaccines and the work they do for us, as well as the work being done through modern science to make them more effective and accessible. I must admit, towards the beginning of the presentation I was quite lost with all the terminology and biological mechanisms since I hadn’t seen biology material since my freshman year of high-school. Tyler made these complicated mechanisms very easy to understand and answered all the questions very well to make sure everyone was understanding the basics of what vaccines do.

I was completely shocked to know that we have so many ways of creating vaccines. I had always thought all vaccines were weaker strains of the full live bacteria we were hoping to protect ourselves against. It was very cool to learn that not only can we use cell parts as vaccines, but we can also use sugars, toxins, outer membrane vesicles, and many others. All of these different ways of tricking our own body into reacting and storing memory cells of the foreign substances for future attacks made me realize just how intricate our inner workings are and how fascinating it is that we have such a grasp on the things we know about ourselves.

Tyler also talked to us about his work in developing a vaccine for the very rare and dangerous Francisella tularensis bacteria. Developed as a bioweapon by the Soviet Union, vaccines for this bacteria are of great interest to the US government for some of its members that work in areas at high risk of chemical attack. The interesting thing about this bacteria is that it hides from detection and therefore doesn’t allow your body to attack it making it very dangerous to remove. All in all, this presentation was amazing and very informative about a topic I knew nothing about.