Peddie EXP Summer 2018

On the very first day, I managed to find the lab by following a paragraph-long instruction sent through the email chain with my mentor, Nino. I was invited to participate in the weekly lab meeting where coincidentally, Nino was scheduled to give a presentation on his current major projects. I was introduced to everybody and the meeting began with the lab members and my PI, Dr. Tang, having casual conversation about their weekends. When Nino finally started his presentation after about thirty minutes, I was sitting quietly in the back of the conference room, surprised and proud of myself that I actually understood what he was talking about. His major project involved transplantation of encapsulation devices for islets as a treatment for type 1 diabetes. Over the next few weeks, I would be repeating his experiments to confirm the first set of data. After the meeting, he gave a quick tour of the lab and took me to the animal center. I learned how to scrub in, from shoe covers, scrubs...

Prior to coming to the lab, I was already contacted by my assigned graduate students, whose projects I will be assisting this summer. I was paired with two: Mika and Sophie. They both got in touch with me right away and arranged meetings with me to brief over their projects. With Mika, I will be aiding her further research on children’s representation of the self through social interactions. My project specifically addresses how long a preschooler will persist on a task that they keep failing at given that preschoolers are sensitive to an audience watching them perform the task. As for Sophie, she deliberately withheld specific details about her project to me because I will be coding videos that she recorded during experimental sessions with the children, and therefore it is important that I remain indifferent. On orientation, I met with the 9 other research assistants that volunteered like I did for the summer. We went around introducing ourselves and they all audibly gasped when...

My first week at the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research at NJIT went (luckily) almost exactly according to plan. After moving in to my room less than a block away from my lab, I had a weekend to contemplate my new home. I would say explore, except, being in Newark, there hasn’t really been that much wandering around. Newark is honestly a rather boring city. Nobody wants to visit, all the stores are closed on weekends and after 6 pm, and pretty much everyone flees to New York City on the weekends. Luckily, a light rail station a block away from my dorm makes that very convenient. I had already gotten an overview of my research over email, and that was confirmed by my PI, Dr. Wang, upon my arrival to the lab. I would be working under Dr. Jing, a research professor, for the first part of my research, when I looked at H-alpha images. These are the emissions from a specific spectral line created by hydrogen. By comparing red- and blue-shifted images, I created a dopplergram. This is an...

     I started work on June 4, just a week after spring term exams. Thankfully I didn't have much trouble finding my lab's building because I had visited it in fall term for an interview. For the duration of my lab, I start work at 9:30 AM and end at 5 PM.      "We're going to the mouse room to injure some mice," my postdoc voiced, walking me to said mouse room. It was only my first day in lab; talk about hitting the ground running. After selecting two boxes of mice in a room lined with shelves of them, my postdoc Dr. Elisia Tichy, or Elisia as we call her, explained to me that she would injure the muscles of the mice. To do so, she anesthetized them and injured their target muscles using injections of notexin, an enzyme found in snake venom. The notexin injuries would cause the muscle stem cells of the mice to activate and divide in abundance. Next week, we will collect their muscle stem cells and analyze them using telomere assays ...

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 measur...

I woke up early on Monday, June 11 th in preparation for any unforeseen events on my way to the Fuccillo lab for the 1 st time. Thankfully, I did – I got lost and turned a 15 minute walk into an unfortunate 40 minute walk through Philadelphia, in particular Penn Campus and CHOP. In hindsight, trying to find a shortcut on the first day may not have been the best idea. To add, Apple maps led me to wrong building, but Google maps saved the day. In the end, however, it all worked out as I arrived just in time to meet with the postdoc I would be under, Dr. Kyuhyun Choi, or Kyu for short. He led me to Dr. Fuccillo’s office (the PI) where we discussed some plans for the summer. I was then introduced to some of other the lab members, which included 2 undergraduates, 3 graduate students, a lab manager, and 1 other postdoc. Everyone was warm and welcoming. Kyu also toured me around the 3 lab spaces the Fuccillo lab uses. These include the main lab area, a separate testing area, as well a...

I happened to start on a Tuesday, so, on Monday, I was left on my own to travel around Philadelphia.  I was incredibly lucky and thankful because I have a friend in the area who did not have school and drove me around to her favorite touristy spots in the city.  First, my friend Sofia took me to Reading Terminal in order for us to have lunch because she told me I would be missing out if I spent 8 weeks in Philadelphia without visiting Reading Terminal at least once.  After, she took me to the Magic Gardens, which originally was a vacant lot, but is now an extremely large mosaic by Isaiah Zagar who is still constantly working on the museum and gallery.  Sofia, who had been to the Magic Gardens many times before, and I were thrilled to see mosaics not only in the museum, but also in the street. Last, but not least, we drove to Harbor Park in order to enjoy ice cream and swing in a hammock before she dropped me off at my apartment. I was incredibly nervous walking...

I started work this past Monday, June 11 th . On the first day, I arrived at Hayden Hall, where the lab is located, a little bit earlier than Dr. Plante (My PI) did. I got into the building when he arrived, and we started working right away. He told me about a change in my project. My project is a based on the research of Liz Coward, one of Dr. Plante’s former PhD students. We planned to extract mineralized-carbon in soil samples, and then conduct thermal analysis on the residues to figure out the soil composition. However, as Dr. Plante was emailing Liz to settle on my project, Liz told him that she kept the residue samples of her extractions in the lab so that I did not have to conduct the extractions again. Dr. Plante decided that I could conduct a different kind of extraction, hot water extraction (HWE), and yield a new set of data. After everyone arrived, he introduced me to other people in the lab. Gabe is an undergrad from the University of Minnesota, and he works with...

**Warning - This is way too long of a blog post, but it’s good, so viewer discretion is advised?** I was never one to deal with homesickness well or cope with a sizeable distance separating me from my family. Before this week, the furthest I had been away from home was at a summer camp in Pennsylvania, a few summers ago, for two weeks. Now, I’m more than 600 miles removed from the comforts of home, for three times as long. But this time, things are different. Through the chaotic weekend of moving into my apartment and the first few days at the lab, I’ve found the town of Ann Arbor to be quite pleasant. The streets are flooded with people around the clock, and the city still feels very much alive, considering the majority of the student body has left for summer. My homesickness has subsided quicker than expected, and I have grown more familiar with the area from my numerous adventures around town. Simply put, I love it here. My first day in the lab went much better than I an...