Patricia Joseph MY ’26 joined Yale’s scientific community long before she arrived on campus for her first semester of college.
Growing up in the New Haven area, she participated in Yale’s science outreach program, Pathways to Science, throughout middle and high school. The program regularly brought her and other New Haven public school students to campus for hands-on STEM workshops taught by Yale students and faculty, from “Brain Day” to “Flipped Science Fair.”
“Exploring different areas of STEM and seeing older people who look like me pursuing careers in science was very inspiring,” says Joseph. “It also impressed me that busy Yale students would volunteer so much of their time to encouraging our burgeoning interest in science.”
Now she herself is one of those Yale students, staying busy with all that the undergraduate experience has to offer as she prepares for a career in medicine. Alongside her coursework in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, Joseph is also conducting laboratory research that is shedding new light on the brain-gut connection.
If Pathways to Science kickstarted her membership in the university’s scientific community, she credits another Yale program, Science, Technology, and Research Scholars (STARS), with sustaining it.
For Research Accessibility
Established in 1995, STARS is designed to support students in science, engineering, and mathematics who come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. The program consists of three components that span a student’s time at Yale: STARS I is tailored for first-year undergraduates and focuses on creating a network of support through peer mentor groups, seminars, professional development programs, and faculty mentorship; STARS Summer Research provides support for rising sophomores and juniors to participate in summer laboratory research with Yale faculty members; and STARS II supports individual student research beginning in the fall semester of their junior year and continuing through the following summer and their senior year.
“I entered Yale with a lot of self-doubt,” says Joseph, who is the first in her family to attend college in the United States. “I felt intimidated and overwhelmed. But STARS immediately placed me in an environment with mentor figures who understood me, supported me, and gave me the confidence to see myself four to five years down the line in the same spaces they’re in.”
Ideal Models
Joseph begins her senior year fresh off a summer working full-time in the lab of Michael P. O’Donnell, assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. “Mike is a fantastic PI and mentor,” she notes. “He has cultivated an extremely supportive lab environment, not only for me but for the grad students and post-docs too. I never feel afraid to ask questions or to have someone check that I’m doing a step correctly.”
In the case of Joseph’s research, there are many steps to get right. The O’Donnell Lab is studying the ways that microbes influence the behavior and physiology of their animal hosts, with a focus on the impact of bacteria on nervous system function. Researchers in the lab use bacteria-feeding roundworms called C. elegans, often found in rotting plant material, as their models. “We study these roundworms, which are commonly colonized by microbes, and run experiments to understand what exactly dictates their behaviors. Is it genetics? Is it their bacterial environment? And then we look at how those interact,” explains Joseph.
Her early days in the lab began with learning how to move the roundworms, feed them, and reliably capture images of them under microscopes. Now she is creating specific mutant strains of C. elegans to study the influence of microbial signals on genes that regulate serotonin. As part of the STARS II program, she’ll be able to continue this research throughout the academic year, gaining valuable experience—and a stipend.
“As a student with expenses, the opportunity to be paid for the work I do in the lab is really important,” says Joseph. This support means she doesn’t need to find additional paid part-time work. Instead, she can dedicate time to teaching dance to children in Yale’s psychiatric hospital, working as a medical assistant at a local primary care clinic, and, in full-circle fashion, volunteering with Yale’s Pathways to Science program.
Staying the Course
After graduating, Joseph plans to spend a year working closely with patients in a clinical setting while applying to medical schools. Through witnessing her parents’ careers—her mother works as a nurse in a liver transplant unit at Yale New Haven Hospital and her father is a certified nursing assistant at a senior living facility—she is keenly aware of the indispensable role of all healthcare workers when it comes to patient care. “I feel grateful that I can aspire to become a doctor, while never taking for granted the people who make that physician’s role possible,” she says.
In the meantime, she has already reached out to the robust network of STARS alumni for advice as she prepares to take her next steps on the journey that began in middle school.
“STARS has put me in shoes that I worried I didn’t belong in,” she says. “It’s helped me form lifelong connections with people from a similar background who also have dreams as big as mine.”