Peddie EXP Summer 2018

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...