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The limited series has six episodes on Netflix.
UMKC’s Women’s Center hosts Feminist Film Friday
Renée Ashley, Staff Writer • September 30, 2023

  UMKC Women’s Center hosted a Feminist Film Friday, featuring the first episode of the new Netflix series “Ladies First: A Story of Women...

GUTS soundtrack features 12 songs, rounding out at 39 minutes.
Olivia Rodrigo “GUTS”: A Second Album Triumph that Cements Her Status
Jackson Ogden, RooTV Co-Executive Producer • September 26, 2023

  Forget a sophomore slump; Olivia Rodrigo just put out a sophomore statement.   Rodrigo released her new album earlier this month, titled...

The Kansas City Repertory Theater is located on UMKCs campus and has a variety of shows throughout the year.
UMKC Student Flourishes in “Cyrano de Bergerac”
Aurora Wilson, Lifestyle and Culture Editor • September 25, 2023

Dri Hernaez, a third-year MFA acting candidate at UMKC, didn’t expect to find a career in acting, but KC Rep Spencer Theater helped her grasp...

The Art Garden KC
The Art Garden KC
Aydan Stigler, Photographer • September 20, 2023

A mural of Patrick Mahomes on the side of Ale House.
The Best Places to Catch the Chiefs This Season
Alexandrea Erisman and Adedeji Adebawore September 15, 2023

Let’s face it, the spot to be on game day is undoubtedly GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, but we can’t all score a ticket inside.   We...

Celebrating Women in STEM: Dr. Izzy Jayasinghe

Celebrating+Women+in+STEM%3A+Dr.+Izzy+Jayasinghe

The heart is a necessary and interesting requirement for human life. The size of an adult fist and weighing around one pound, the heart pumps close to 2,000 gallons of blood through your body each day. The cardiovascular system as a whole contains over 60,000 miles of blood vessels. This incredible system requires incredible care. One woman in STEM tackling the challenge of imaging the cardiovascular system is Dr. Izzy Jayasinghe.

Jayasinghe completed her undergraduate education, with first class honors, in cardiovascular biology in 2006 at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She remained in Auckland for her Ph.D. in physiology, which she finished in 2011. Her thesis on optical microscopy methodologies applied to the cardiovascular system won the Vice Chancellor’s “Best Doctoral Thesis” award.

After graduation, Jayasinghe accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. She developed new ways to image fine membrane structures in skeletal muscles, including 3D imaging and direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM). In 2013, she moved to the United Kingdom to accept a research fellowship at the University of Exeter. She continued to work on super-resolution imaging for cellular organelles and biomolecules.

In 2015, Dr. Jayasinghe became a faculty member in Cardiovascular Sciences in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Leeds. She led the Nanoscale Microscope Group in developing new methods for mapping proteins with a resolution of near 10 nanometers (for reference, a human hair is about 60,000 nanometers wide). In May 2020, Jayasinghe will be joining the Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Sheffield. She’s bringing with her a curriculum vitae that includes over 20 publications, multiple book chapters and a couple dozen invited seminars and talks. She’s also a committee member on the Life Sciences Committee of the Royal Microscopical Society.

Jayasinghe has won multiple awards and grants throughout her career. In 2007, she won a three-year scholarship from the Auckland Medical Research Foundation, worth NZ$97k (almost $80k USD). In 2010, she won the Hubbard Memorial Prize from the Physiological Society of New Zealand. In 2018, she was nominated for the Medal in Life Sciences by the Royal Microscopical Society. This year, she was awarded the UK Research and Innovation Future Leader Fellowship, a six-year grant worth £1.13 million (over $1.4 million USD).

In addition to her decorated career in microscopy, Jayasinghe is also passionate about diversity and education. Her own experiences with homophobia and transphobia kept her in the closet for much of her career. In 2018, she became a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, U.K. In 2019, she joined TIGERinSTEMM, a group developed to further discussion about equality, diversity and accessibility in the U.K. science, technology engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) education system.

Are you interested in empowering women in the STEM fields? The Women in Science (Wi-Sci) group wants you! Email President Emily Larner ([email protected]) for more information.

[email protected]

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