Courtney Fillmore
- B.A. in Biological Sciences from Wayne State University
- Currently a first-year student in MGG MS program
I have had the pleasure of being a part of Wayne State University for the past 10 years as either a student or employee. After graduating with my bachelor’s degree, I continued my education through the Post-Bachelor Forensic Investigation program and had the opportunity of interning at the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office as a medical death investigator. Throughout this program, I was also gaining lab experience as a laboratory assistant by processing clinical samples from high-risk pregnancies and grossing placentas at the Perinatology Research Branch.
I now supervise a laboratory in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Eugene Applebaum and have currently been culturing renal proximal tubule epithelial cells. I have been exposing these cells to different potential toxins and performing a variety of assays and experiments such as cell viability and proliferation assays, western blots, nuclear fluorescent staining and imaging, immunohistochemistry, wound healing assays, cell death and autophagy flow cytometry, and qPCR.
With the education from the forensics program and a MS in Molecular Genetics and Genomics, I have aspirations of becoming a DNA analyst in a crime laboratory performing different DNA testing methodologies. This is a long-term goal that I am motivated to achieve, as well as continuing my research while focusing more on genomic studies.