Skip to main content

Aishwarya -- first few days

I swear Uber said I'd be there by 8:20, but I ended up getting to the lobby at 8:40 (they asked me to get there by 8:30). I freaked out for a little, but then realized that no one really cared. My postdoc, Giulia, gave me a warm welcome and introduced me to the rest of the lab. I met with my PI and three undergrads who were also fairly new to the lab. I was the only high school intern for now, but there was another one coming next week. My PI, Amelia, quizzed other lab members and me on various things about the dentate gyrus, and I wasn't the only one who was completely clueless!!! Contrary to what I thought, I wasn't going to be entering the lab-space at all, since I wasn't trained enough to work with the rodents, so I was placed at an office, and, instead of working with rats, I'd be watching videos about them (yay?). It turned out to be really interesting to score rat behaviors, and by the time I was completely invested in them and felt like I was actually contributing to the lab, Giulia called me to a Journal Club meeting. I had to read a paper for this meeting previously and had done so like I did for all the papers I read for EXP. Unfortunately, my way of reading the paper was not enough to answer the questions that were presented to me at the journal club (they picked on me a lot), but I think I didn't look like a complete dunce by the end. Fortunately, the journal club let me learn a lot about the experiment they were currently working on, and now I know how in-depth I have to read into the papers in preparation for the next Journal club :). My work hours seem to be really flexible, as long as I do some work (I have to report what I do everyday on a notebook), so I've settled on a 9:30 - 4:00 schedule, and I've figured out how to Uber on time.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evan Bradley, Week 3 at the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute

As mentioned in my previous blog, I have been awaiting ligament, menisci, and cartilage tissue from a canine or human knee joint for (interleukin) IL-1B tissue culture. IL-1B is an inflammatory cytokine that has been proven to increase rates of tissue degeneration and osteoarthritis development in the Thompson Lab. Dr. Stoker wants me to experiment with different types of knee tissues in a co-culture with varying levels of this cytokine to determine its effects on the entire knee joint. This co-culture uses an insert permeable to the media to separate the two tissue samples from physical contact, while allowing them to share the same media. This creates an extremely accurate model for knee tissues in their native environment due to their exposure to the same synovial fluid in the joint. This model would then be treated with the IL-1B and cultured for 21 days. During these 21 days, the media would be collected every three days for biomarker evaluation at the end of the stu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Cheng, In My Own Room

I had no idea that Pennsylvania is this wide. Within the first hour, my train had reached Philly. But to Pittsburgh, it took another seven. Even before I stepped foot into the Search-Based Planning Lab, I was waylaid by some anxious news. The PhD student assigned to be my mentor, Dhruv, texted me that he, Dr. Likhachev, and most of the lab would be out of town for the entire week. So that was that. Fortunately, it was my first week, the week to be spent learning new material, and Dhruv provided me with plenty to digest. I already had ROS (Robot Operating System) installed, so I looked towards the tutorials that ROS provided. I copied commands into my Linux laptop's terminal to run ROS features. I learned the basic structure of ROS: packages, services and clients, publishers and subscribers, messages, nodes, and topics (which nodes communicate messages over). There was one simple yet interesting program I came across in the tutorials called turtlesim, for which using only 2 comm...
3 comments
Read more