Peddie EXP Summer 2018

     Due to some miscommunication and scheduling problems, I got my UCSF ID badge at the start of my second week. Now, I could go to the bathroom without being locked out of the lab and finally start my online training. I successfully completed the training within a day since Nino (my mentor) had to go to the hospital to retrieve thyroid glands and a few other organs from a human donor.      These samples were frozen and stored in the cold room, which is what lab members call the giant walk-in fridge. The next day, we thawed the thyroid cells and placenta cells to sort them using the fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) machine. The steps required to use this machine is quite long, but I was able to master it after preparing over a hundred samples and repeating the protocol about five times. First, the cells need to be transferred to well plates and centrifuged for five minutes at 1200rpm. Then, I get rid of the supernatant with a shar...

In the past two weeks, I have begun testing on children at the Bing nursery school. The nursery is a part of the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and was a gift from Dr. Peter S. Bing and his mother, Mrs. Anna Bing Arnold. The children enrolled at the nursery are mostly available as research subjects for the Stanford Psychology Department since their parents have given consent to their participation in research. Despite this, the nursery is extremely nice and has all sorts of activities for the children to partake. Within the nursery, there are three main classrooms for the children and experimental rooms for the researchers. These experimental rooms are called 'game rooms' because in order to get a child to participate in their research, an experimenter would have to ask them to come to the game room to play with the experimenter's game. Within these game rooms are cameras, microphones, and a one-way mirror, where the children can be observed from an observat...

The last two weeks consisted of hot-water extractions, TOC analysis, and experimental design. Initially, Dr. Plante told us to run two trials with three samples in each of our individual trials. Kyle and I would be using two different soil-to-water ratios in order to figure out which is better. I had a lot of free time in the lab when the samples were on the end-to-end shaker or were heating up for TOC analysis, so I spent the time reading some primary articles and sometimes my summer reading when I was tired. For TOC analysis of trial 1, we used mid-range kits, which allow for smaller concentrations of carbon, but it turned out that some concentrations were higher than the range of 15-150mg/L, so we decided to use high-range kits for trial 2. In trial 2, one of the sample concentrations was negative, which represented an experimental error. After discussing with Dr. Plante, we decided to add a trial 3. However, our results were not nice either. We did not use syringes for the...

The last two weeks have been slightly hectic.  My first week in the lab I became used to the easy 7 minute walk from my apartment to the Schattner building.  However, due to the need to go through some mandatory training for Penn, I was required to take a 17 minute walk past Penn and past Drexel to reach the Environmental Health and Radiation Safety (EHRS) office.  This training session covered basic, common sense rules, such as "Do not eat in the lab" and more specific guidelines for chemical safety and biohazards.  I was glad to find that I already knew much of what was explained during the training, thanks to having worked in a fume hood before for chemistry and having had some hands on experiments in my previous science classes. On Tuesday of my second week, Dr. Peretz, Ms. Cozine, and Ms. Terhaar came to take all of the EXPers in Philadelphia (except for Wendy) out to lunch at the White Dog Cafe.  It was really exciting to see some alumni and catch up with...

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since my last blog post – I’ll chalk that up to being so busy these past couple of weeks with lab work and other things. Going into my fourth week at the Roy lab, it’s hard to believe that my time here is flying by so quickly already, but here we are.  After my first week at the lab, I started working on my independent project. As I mentioned before, my lab works with creating bioartificial organ devices, specifically an implantable artificial pancreas. Once implanted, the patients blood goes through the device and through diffusion, an ultrafiltrate is produced by passing the blood across a silicon nanopore membrane (SNM). (here’s a picture of one of those silicon nanopore membranes I keep talking about - the rainbow is from refracted light, not actual coloring)  This ultrafiltrate is mostly just blood plasma, but it has a couple of key ingredients: dissolved oxygen, glucose, and other nutrients. The ultrafiltrate is then fed thro...