Charles Chung - Week 5

Summer is over :(

This week, after analyzing my conclusions and graphs, I gathered some of the videos, photos and analysis to produce a presentation for my experience. For Wednesday’s lab meeting, along with David, I presented myself, the EXP program as well as what I had worked on and learned over the last four weeks.

For the rest of the week, I started on my poster. David showed me some examples of posters he had presented in the past made using Adobe Illustrator and helped me get started with it. I decided to try and do the poster completely on Illustrator than PowerPoint to customize whatever I wanted. The presentation I had done helped to structure my poster and I could pull information from my earlier analysis and other papers I had read.

This summer, I worked on analyzing body rotations of the bat as it approaches landing as well as hypothesized and tested for factors that affected impact forces like hovering/non-hovering and distance between approach and landing. Many hypotheses were debunked but some proved to have a promising positive trend. David would be writing up a published paper about his study of the Thyroptera landings. On the last day, he told me my name was going to be published as well!

Overall, I had a great time studying quite a specific field. I would have never run into a research experience like this if it hadn’t been for EXP. I am thankful for my parents, Dr. Peretz, Mr. Sham for their help during the EXP program and thank you to Dr. Swartz and David for guiding me through the research they do on a daily basis.

Comments

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

Search This Blog