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Tori DiStefano, Week 1

Today is my 5th day at NIDA, but basically my third day in the lab. Because NIDA is a government institution, we go through a substantial amount of training just to get basic clearance (our NIH badges). Prior to arriving, I was required to complete a few privacy and security and lab safety modules. Getting here, I reported directly to orientation with the other summer interns. There are two waves of NIDA summer interns coming in this summer, and I’m in the first one. The second wave will come in about a week (considering I’m already done 1 of my weeks). Collectively, there are going to be about 55 interns, and I think 13 of them are in my research branch. Specifically, I’m in the Neuroimaging Research Branch, under Dr. Betty Jo Salmeron. From this first wave of interns, there are three of us under her, the other two interns being college students. We were all assigned different projects Wednesday morning. My project is assessing data in the confirmation of a common bifactor to measure psychpathological morbidity, called the ‘p factor’. To best describe the ‘p factor’ (which is yet to be confirmed), I’ll explain what the ‘g factor’ is. The ‘g factor’ is a general intelligence factor, like an IQ measure. Basically, the presence of the ‘g factor’ entails that there is a certain liability for people to have a higher or lower intelligence. If you were to take a test to determine your ‘g factor’ score, you would fall within a certain threshold perhaps higher than the mean ‘g factor’ value. This in turn would predict your scores on other tests that are subcategories of intelligence (ie reading comprehension, computation, etc). The presence of the ‘p factor’ suggests there is an underlying presence of factors that make you more likely to develop mental disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder, drug abuse, and schizophrenia. The literature I’ve been given suggests that ‘p factor’ scores have a genetic basis, which predisposes one to mental illness, but it is environmental factors that determine how this genetic predisposition manifests as a particular mental disorder. There’s a decent bit more about neural structure implications I could go into, but I don’t want to bore you.

To specify, today is a Friday, and every Friday we have a lab meeting with an hour of journal club and an hour of lab updates. Because I have yet to receive my badge, I can’t access my government server email from home, so, when I came into the lab this morning I was greeted with a 12 page primary source article sent to me the night before to read prior to journal club (which was 2 hours away at this point). Well, I survived and made it to our meeting all read up about a study on resting functional connectivity. We discussed the journal for an hour, led by one of the doctors on our floor. For the second half of our meeting, one of the graduate students presented a project he was going to be starting, using TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) on spider monkeys to analyze the full extent of effects in TMS. The whole basis of the project was that TMS has rarely been done on non-human primates, as they’re so hard to handle and have stay still, which is needed for TMS.

In some non-work related news, I finally experienced Ledo’s Pizza, which my cousins down here love. Honestly, I went into that fully aware that New Jersey/New York are the only two states capable of making pizza (however, one of the other interns is from Chicago, and I can’t speak on deep dish, but I’ve heard good things). Long story short, it definitely tasted like Maryland pizza. We also went to Pachanga, a Mexican restaurant, and it was just uncomparable to Tacorito, but I couldn’t tell my family that. For the weekend, one of my cousins was working both days and the other one wasn’t going to be home, so I headed back to Jersey after work Friday (it’s only a two hour driven so I don’t mind it at all, compared to my 40 minute drive back to my house in Maryland). I spent the weekend having bonfires and going mini golfing and thankfully seeing my parents for a bit.

(sidenote, I have absolutely no idea why my paragraphs are um not paragraphs so please don't mind the atrocity of these paragraphs)
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