Raga Bhagavathi, Week 5

I continued to collect more data this week and enter everything into the computer as usual. I've been feeling in a little slump lately because I wasn't sure what the next step of my project would be and it seemed like I would just be doing data collection for my whole stay at the lab. However, I was able to meet with Dr. Lewis and we had a long conversation about what the next step of my project would be. Initially it seemed as though I was continuing on a previous study comparing facial recognition abilities between children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, children with Learning Disorders, children with ADHD, and Typically Developing children. However, my conversation with Dr. Lewis was really beneficial and he explained what I would be doing after I finished collecting as much data as I could. He said that we would be working together to split my subjects into two groups- technologically oriented and non-technologically oriented, and then someone would show me how to analyze the data. He hypothesized that the "techies" would perform worse on the facial recognition task (because they would have less experience in social situations due to their preference to spend time alone and/or on electronics) and the non-techies would perform better on the task. He also explained that there isn't much research on this topic so if we found any conclusive research it could be really rewarding. To be honest, I could listen to Dr Lewis talk for hours on end because he's so smart and everything he explains genuinely interests me. I planned to only have two more weeks in the office and I should be done with data collection this week, so depending on how fast (or slow) the data analysis seems to be moving, I may have to extend my stay by a week- but we'll see!

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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...

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...

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...

Peddie EXP Summer 2018

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