Rohit, My First Week at the Berkeley Deep Drive Lab

My first day at my lab was generally straightforward, except for the location. Initially I expected my lab to be on Berkeley's campus a short ten minute walk away from my apartment that I will be sharing with Alan for the rest of my time at Berkeley. Just to make sure I was going to the right location I e-mailed my PI, Dr. Chan, to confirm what time and where he wanted to meet with me. Fortunately my PI responds to his emails quickly and informed me that I would actually need to go to the Richmond field station, which was 6 miles north and a twenty minute shuttle ride away. The Richmond field station was previously a naval base but has been an extension of the Berkeley campus since the 1950's. The field station is used by many of the Berkeley researchers that require additional space for testing as space in generally is limited on campus.

In terms of autonomous driving there are many different groups of researchers each working on different projects, Dr. Chan's team works with two Lincoln MKZ vehicles to collect raw real world data that could be used for further analysis and development of autonomous control algorithms. There is also another group of researchers that work directly with Hyundai and are working on developing a fully autonomous Hyundai vehicles, lastly there is another groups of researchers that are working on creating autonomous semi-trucks in a partnership with the Canadian DOT (department of transportation), US DOT and Volvo.

Dr. Chan introduced me to the rest of his team which included a local high school student, two graduate students one from South Carolina and the other from France, three doctorate students, two from China and one also from France. I worked with Mr. Long Xin who was a doctorate student from China, he explained to me the current projects the lab was working on and recommend that I learn how to code in python so I could understand and help out with certain tasks. As a result I ended up spending my first week and a half working on learning how to code in python through an online tutorial. Although this made me feel as though I was completing a tedious task I understood that it was necessary for me to later help contribute to the lab's research.

Comments

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...

Alan - First Week at UCSF

Hi Everyone! After arriving in San Francisco last Sunday, I spent this past week settling into the downtown Berkeley apartment that I’ll be sharing with Rohit for the next couple of months, as well as learning my way around the Roy lab at UCSF. First day at the lab was really exciting. Here are a couple pictures of the Mission Bay campus, which was completed just a few years ago. Everything is super new and modern, and there’s still construction for other buildings going on around the campus. Most of the people who work at the Mission Bay campus are either professional researchers or doctors/nurses for the nearby hospital. The graduate students take most of their classes at the original Parnassus campus (where Maya is). I work in Byers Hall, which is connected to Genentech Hall and a short walk down the block from the shuttle stop. There are three other volunteers working for the Roy lab this summer – Kimmai, David, and Pujita, who are all undergrad college students...

Wendy Li, Week 1

It is now early July and I have finally started my lab work. I arrived there at about 9 am on the very first day of my lab and found out that there were only two people in the office—Alex, a graduate student in engineering school, and me. “There should be more people in the office, but most of them went to a vacuum workshop today.” Alex told me. My work officially started at 10:30 am when my post doctor Subarna came to the lab. Familiarizing me with all the facilities in lab, Subarna first gave me a lab tour. Meanwhile, he showed me all the basic operations with vacuum chamber, ellipsometer, as well as the spin coater. During the rest of this past week, I was in the process of making my own films. I learned to cut Si wafer into 1*1 cm pieces and clean the surface of these Si wafer with duster and plasma which can effectively clean up all the extra organic particles from the wafer. Further, I prepared 10 percent polystyrene (PS 8000) toluene solution as the material for spin coating. ...

Peddie EXP Summer 2018

Search This Blog