-: My name is Jennifer Fazi, I work at Mayo Clinic
and I am a Technical Specialist too, there.
The Mayo Clinic is a health care organization.
We are a hospital,
we also have an education branch
and a research branch.
So, we have research, education and practice.
I work in a clinical laboratory.
It is the Molecular Genetics Laboratory,
so what we do in the laboratory
is that we take patient samples,
whether that is blood or tumor tissue,
and we analyze it.
We extract the DNA out of that sample
and we analyze it for any mutations.
So, my particular position
in that laboratory is a Technical Specialist,
and my focus as a Technical Specialist
in this laboratory is to bring new tests
that development technologists have brought up,
and bring it into the clinical realm,
so that these tests can be run routinely.
Within the labs, there are a variety of job titles.
Most entry level students,
or graduates, would come into positions like
Clinical Laboratory Technologist.
Those without a four year degree,
they would go into maybe more
of a laboratory assistant position.
But, those are our people sitting at the benches,
performing the tests, the laboratory technologists are.
So, we do oncological samples.
For example, a sample that we would get in the laboratory
would be an excised tumor
that has been taken out of somebody's body.
It comes to our laboratory as a piece of tissue,
and we create slides of the tissue,
like we slice them,
slice the tumor up into small portions.
And then, we extract DNA from that tissue,
and then we run our analysis on,
on the tissue and look for mutations.