Back to the Lab

I'm back! I started to consider a path in research about a year ago but I could never have imagined where I am today already. I am incredibly excited to be contributing to research in the Padiath lab again and continuing my project after all I was able to accomplish this past summer. I will be sharing more of my experiences here throughout my continued research.

One of the major things I realized now that I have started classes again is how much theory I simply didn't know and was learning from scratch during this summer. I ended up in a Human Genetics lab as a chemistry major who had taken only introductory biology, yet my day-to-day activities were in molecular biology surrounding topics of genetics and neuroscience. I am so happy I received the lab placement I did - it was my top choice and my work was so interesting - but wow, I was missing so much background. I've found over time that being thrown into research situations that cover topics I have not previously learned about in detail actually help me retain the new information very well, since I everything I am learning is immediately applicable. Situations like that can be a whirlwind but so rewarding. However, I wonder if my time in the lab would have been different had I only needed to remember concepts rather than learn them entirely.

Since I am continuing my project from the summer and am no longer part of the fellowship program, I am working directly with the other undergraduate student and we are able to coordinate our time around our classes. It can be hectic for us, but it is nice to have someone else at my level - she is even in the same grade as me - to share the work with. The new lab technician has also started working in the lab, so my undergraduate peer and I have been officially moved to the room where the thermal cyclers are rather than our space on the lab bench in the open floor area. I can't really complain considering that I have to use one of the thermal cyclers during the Western Blot procedure to denature the protein by heat.

Figure 1. My new best friend, Veriti. When I go to lab now, I spend
most of my time with this machine, even when I am not using it (ThermoFisher).

I have started working with cells again, so coming in on weekends is still necessary. However, each day that I am coming in, I only have to stay for about an hour or two, which is nice. I am so grateful to be able to continue lab work through this semester, even though I am in the midst of classes and other responsibilities. Since I am not at the lab nearly as much, we have only gotten on set of results so far, but thankfully they are promising. However, we were conducting the experiment to try to figure out why we had weird results during another related experiment, so I think the initial experiment will now need to be redone. We are now starting a new but very similar project as to what I had started in the summer, in which we are going through the same experimental process for another drug to see which is a more viable option to treat Autosomal Dominant Leukodystrophy, using cell cultures.

I have already presented my summer research project once through the Center for Neuroscience at Pitt as part of my fellowship, and I will soon be presenting again - with less detail to protect the secrecy of our work - to students and faculty at my home institution, Chatham University, as part of a lecture series focused on work that students conducted over the summer. I feel very lucky to be able to talk at my home institution in such a public way about my summer research experience, and hopefully I might even inspire some students at my university to pursue an internship or a research experience this upcoming summer, or even sooner. I submitted a picture from my internship for the event flyer - the picture is one of my favorites that the lab technician so nicely took of me during my summer experience.

Figure 2. The protective gear I had to wear every time I went to work with the mice. This picture is now around my university's science building on the event flyer, and I just wonder what people think is in the container I am holding. 

I believe there will be about six or seven other students presenting their work from this past summer, including current sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Though I conducted research during the summer after my first year, it was in a very relaxed manner. I am fairly certain that the sophomore students presenting completed internships or working on research over this past summer, and I am so impressed that they were already so driven to dedicate their summers to science so early in their undergraduate career. I cannot wait to hear about my peers' summers, and probably will gush about their work further in a future blog post after the presentations are complete.

References:

ThermoFisher Scientific. n.d. Veriti 96-Well Thermal Cycler. <https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/4375786>.