Elijah Martin is a second year graduate student in the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology program at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He works in the laboratory of Dr. Deepak Srivastava at the Gladstone Institutes where he studies how the heart forms to try to understand causes of heart disease in order to develop therapies. In the lab, Martin grows heart cells in petri dishes, which involves mixing together different chemicals and nutrients to get the cells to grow and develop into a heart. He also uses microscopes to track the growth of the cells. Since he was a young child he has wanted to study the heart, and going to graduate school can help turn his dream into a career.