Peddie EXP Summer 2018

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. ...

Behind the scenes of the AMNH. This week, I got through digitizing all the trials from 17 to 71 on the shoulders and lumbar for three important frames. In that digitizing, I calibrated two more trials, which took up to Wednesday to finish. I calibrated only three frames for the exact frame of tuck, land and settle to be extracted for other analysis. Wednesday afternoon, I was able to graph boxplots with the new data taken from digitizing to compare Ftot (total impact force) with velocities (distance between xyz points divided by the time in frames – 600 frames per second). On Thursday, Dr. Swartz, David, Melissa (an undergrad) and I went to New York City to visit the American Museum of Natural History. We went to loan for good bat specimens for future experiments. I had a great time even though I had been to the museum numerous times because we went to the secret collections area above the museum itself. I didn’t take too many photos as there were strict social media rul...

Swarm Lab weeks 9 and 10 This is it. This is the end. My time working for the Swarm Lab has come to an end. I cannot believe 10 weeks have passed by so quickly. Where has the summer gone?! I'm moving straight from the lab on Friday to school on Monday, without so much as a break, so I am reasonably stressed out at the prospect of returning to the rigor of Peddie. At the lab, I work individually and go at my own pace, which is a very nice way to work. However, Peddie is the opposite, which is not a bad thing per se, it will just be a bit of an adjustment when I begin. The past two weeks in the lab have been wonderful, and the 10 vs. 1 experiments have progressed nicely. As I predicted, I will not be able to finish the 10 vs. 1 set, but I have set a good foundation for whoever will complete it. As I mentioned last time, there is a new girl in the lab, Shayna. At first, it took a little bit to get used to having another person in the lab with me. We would always bump into another,...

My last week was actually one of my most fun. I had pretty much finished with my research and was working on a presentation that I had to do for the Provost Program. This gave me a lot more free time, and I spent it hanging out with friends and generally enjoying my last days in Newark. I went out to lunch with Jaqueline, one of my friends who was also working at NJIT, pretty much every day, and our cuisine ranged from the food truck right outside the building to a place that served exclusively meatballs. I actually became really fond of Newark in my stay there. It’s definitely not as bad as people make it out to be, and there are a lot of parts about it that are good, or just funny. Since I went on daily walks for pretty much my entire stay, I knew the layout of the city very well, and had explored a lot (but only in the not-sketchy areas). I, of course, had my favorite walking path, which had many of the nicest views in the city. I also really liked some of the quirkier things a...

This final week at Columbia University was a week of data collection and interpretation. I was given the data from the two mice with my electrodes implanted in them. In a nutshell – the results were hideous but results nonetheless. My PI will be inserting ore electrodes that I made during my five weeks in the lab. He will be sending the results over. In the end, I made 11 electrodes. My goal was 4. I believe that I made a lasting impression in the lab. I took initiative in my work and taught another person who will be taking over my next for the following two months. In the end, my experience at Columbia was just wonderful, and a completely diverse one than the experience I had in the flora of UC San Diego.

EXP has finally come to an end. Considering that silicon wafer should be better for dropcasting, I then created PS film embedded with gold nanorod on silicon substrate and measured it with ellipsometer. Besides, I finally got the chance to perform SEM imaging to sample films to see the overall dispersion and out-of–plane orientation of nanorods. As a result, nanorods were mostly evenly distributed all over the film; however, they are distributed in small nanorod clusters, suggesting that I can still dilute the nanorod solution for future adjustment of this research. As my 7-week research came to an end, I would like to thank all my group mates, especially Subarna and Lexi, for supporting my summer research throughout last two months. In addition to broadening my theoretical knowledge, gaining lots of hand on experience with all these fantastic facilities, and gradually growing up towards a real researcher, I am really grateful for being a part of the group. It was a pleasure to wat...

The final week of my lab was mostly uneventful because Bing had closed for the summer. The lab had sent out requests for parents to bring their children in voluntarily for research, probably with promises of cash, and the research assistants should only show up during the times that were booked by the parents. Therefore, I had more freedom and better control of the schedule since I could show up for the allotted time rather than staying for three hours waiting for Isabel to recruit children. This week's lab meeting was also the research assistant's turn to present their summer works. The lab meetings are usually done by the graduate students, but since most of the research assistants have programs that link to the lab (such as how I'm at the lab because of EXP) and most of us have to present for our programs, the lab thought it was a good opportunity for us to receive feedbacks and practice for future presentations. The meeting was attended by the whole lab, including the...

After being out of the country for nearly three months I am sitting In the Sydney Airport ready to board my flight back to the US. I still can not believe what an amazing experience I had and how welcoming my lab was. I was able to help out with amazing projects that I would never have had the change to be a part of without EXP. I learned what types marine biology I do and don’t enjoy, and I got to see what it was like to work as a researcher in a laboratory setting.   I am so grateful for this opportunity and I can’t wait to share my experience with the Peddie community.

This week I am in the field catching harks at rays at Orpheus Island where there is a research station owned by James Cook University. Each day we get up early (around 5:30-6am)so that we can get some work done before low tide at 12pm. We take all out of gear and equipment and place it on an ocean kayak which we drag along with us as we search for rays and baby black tips in the mangroves. Once we spot one we place a drop net around it so that it is trapped in a circle and then we use a hand set to take it out. We determine and record the species, sex, disc width, catch time, and GPS coordinates of the catch location. We then tag it and take a tissue sample, a genetic sample, and if possible a blood sample. One person then runs back on to the island with the blood sample so that it can be placed in the centrifuge immediately before the blood can coagulate. The other people then release the tagged ray and record the release time and what state the ray or shark is in...

My 6 th week of summer research was really busy. Coming to a realization that fitting method (model) I created last week was not a good fit to other nanocomposite film, I decided to refine the fitting method, especially the fitting method for gold nanorod layer. What I was trying to do was fitting the polystyrene and gold nanorod layer separately. Hence, I first fitted the polystyrene layer and measured its thickness right after the PS solution was spin coated on the glass substrate. Then, I dropcasted gold nanorod solution directly onto the glass substrate to create a separate gold nanorod layer. Using the ellipsometer, I, again, recorded the thickness and created a fitting method. Without the influence of variables from polystyrene layer, the fitting process for gold nanorod layer will be easier and more precise. Following that, I combined the two separate fitting methods together to create a complete fitting method for PS film embedded with nanorod. In addition to refine the fitt...

Exclusive Rhode Island holidays? Every second Monday of August, Rhode Island celebrates Victory Day over the Japanese (the only state that has this holiday). I arrived and was confused about where everyone was. I knew that David was on his way back from Virginia so he wouldn’t be there on Monday. I continued to work on boxplotting the data I had collected last week. Then Dr. Swartz emailed me saying I didn’t have to come to the lab today and take the day off. I worked on finishing the last few trials for impact forces and heading home for a long weekend. On Tuesday, David was back at the lab. We discussed what I had done and came up with different hypothesis, as our old hypothesis was debunked. We kept graphing and comparing the numbers, checking to see for any patterns and proposed a number of experiments to try. I was then introduced to another coding language, R, because MATLAB could be tedious with some of the functions we were carrying out. During the lab meeting o...

This week, I designed an in vitro conditioned media experiment to test the effects of parathyroid gland (PTG)-derived CD34+ cells on stressed human islets. To stress these cells, I cultured them for 24 hours in either replete media (control), 1% diluted media, 1% oxygen (to induce hypoxia), or both stress factors. I added SCIPCs, PTG cells, CD34- cells, or CD34+ cells to one of each category, resulting in total of 16 wells. This is the image of the well plates in the incubator for overnight culture. The next day, I looked at the conditions of the cells using a microscope and I could visibly see that islets in wells containing CD34+ cells were doing much better than all the other wells. Then, I stained the cells using propidium iodide (PI), which binds to the DNA. However, it cannot cross the membrane of live cells and thus only stains dead cells. With PI staining, I could quantify cell viability of each well using flow cytometry. As I have seen wit...