Brief Biographical Sketch:

My name is Bridget Wall, and I'm originally from St. Paul Minnesota. As the daughter of two teachers, my childhood was spent reading about everything and anything, doing lots of science experiments, and asking questions about the world around me. For my undergraduate degree, I attended Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU), a small liberal arts institution in Bloomington, Illinois. Believe it or not, I started out at IWU as a music performance major, but I decided to take general biology my first year---and it was fantastic! Soon, my love of biology began to push me in the direction of a biology major, and I decided to pursue biology full-time and enjoy music in my spare time (still do, actually! I’m a member of the MIT Symphony, which is great). I worked my way through some wonderful courses at IWU---invertebrate zoology, biochemistry developmental biology, animal physiology---as well as doing research starting in my sophomore year. After spending the summer at MIT for a research internship, I fell in love with both the collaborative nature of the people I worked with as well as the incredible quality of the science…it helped me decide that scientific research was something that I wanted to do for a career. I applied to the Biological Engineering program, and the rest was history! Now that I’m at MIT, I work in the lab of Dr. Jacquin Niles engineering molecular tools to help study diseases such as malaria. My days are busy, but the science of living things never fails to amaze me and push me on to the next discovery or late-night experiment. Truly, I love every second that I am able to talk about science! I’m not sure what I will do following graduation, but some options include academia, working with educational advocacy and public policy, or becoming Ms. Frizzle (I’m rooting for the last option myself!)

Past Classes