2015
Letter to Texas 4000 Rider: Alexander Zwaan
Dear Alexander,
Hello. My name is Sean Thomas, and I am part of the BME CUReS Cancer REU at UT this summer. My research is on lipid membranes, which are similar to cells, except that they don’t have organelles or proteins. The work of Dr. Stachowiak’s lab may eventually lead to lipid membranes with enclosed cancer drugs delivering drugs specifically to cancer cells, leaving other cells untouched by their toxic payload. I picked you as my letter recipient first because you were on the Ozarks route, and we in the REU have not had any mass interactions with your team yet, and second, because as someone with the last name Thomas, I commiserate with everyone whose last name is at the end of the alphabet. That being said, this letter goes out not only to you but to the whole Ozarks team and all of the Texas 4000 Riders.
When I was applying to REUs, I honestly l thought to myself “Wow! 10 weeks?! That is a lot of my summer. I could be spending that time with my friends.” Of course, I knew there was only going to be 7-9 other people in my REU with me, but who knew if I’d get along well with any of them. Certainly not as well as with my established friends, right?
Well, after nine and a half weeks in Austin, I want more, and it has nothing to do with me not wanting to go back to school. 10 weeks was not enough.
The friends I made here have been great, and I am definitely not ready to close the books on my research. In fact, I will very likely be taking it back to the lab I work in at the University of South Carolina. But mostly because of my friends here. And I have done 100 times more with them then I could have hoped to do with my friends back home.
I am sure you—if not Alexander, then at least some of you—felt the same way. 10 weeks of biking day-in and day-out is daunting. There is definitely an opportunity cost associated with it. But I bet you guys bonded with your squad like nobody’s business. Not to mention that in both our cases we did work that was beyond worth doing, whether raising money for cancer research or performing it.
For my photo this blog post, I looked through my phone for good pictures of our time here. The first one I found was one of us (below) in front of the Tower taking after we went to an 18+ club and Kerbey Lane at about 2:30 AM on our friend whom we adopted from another REU, Justin’s last night. As I went deeper into my photos and earlier into the summer, I found another photo of the Tower (above) with nothing in the foreground but a statue taken on our first weekend excursion, when we explored the Dobie in the morning and the Capitol in the afternoon.
These pictures are perfect for framing the REU: a picture of the Tower in the morning, taken at the dawn of our REU and a picture of the same Tower in the waning hours of both the night and the REU, with a new morning about to dawn. The foreground of the first contains a lone statue of horse and rider. It is a picture from the REU students’ and the riders’ shared time in Austin, and even the horse is fitting, as in its infancy, the bicycle was known as a hobby horse. We came in riding alone, but that quickly changed as we picked up your program’s idea of dedicated one’s week of labor to others. The foreground of the second is even more fitting, as now, the lone rider has been replaced by a group of friends.
Now, as we ride out of Austin, we won’t be riding alone.
-Sean Thomas, Univ of South Carolina
Alexander Swaan is a UT Austin International Relations senior and a member of the Ozarks Team!
Clinical Research Collaboration
If the bond between a doctoral candidate and their Principal Investigator (PI) is as permanent as marriage, academic collaboration, says Dr. Jason Reichenberg, is like dating. Dr. Reichenberg, a practicing physician at Seton Hospital and the Clinical Director of Dermatology for UT Physicians, has collaborated with Dr. James Tunnell, of the Biophotonics Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, for seven years. Together, they have developed and tested various medical devices, including an optical probe for the detection of skin cancer for which they were recently awarded the South By Southwest Interactive Innovation SciFi No Longer award. On Friday, July 31st, the BME CUReS Cancer REU students had the privilege of meeting these passionate individuals, learning what to expect from a partnership.
Like a romantic relationship, the core advice centered not around having identical expertise, but around sharing similar mindsets and goals. Bouncing sentences off of each other, Dr. Reichenberg discussed his previous attempts at collaboration, which ultimately failed due to, among other things, dissimilar expectations of timeframes, while Dr. Tunnell summarized, stating that the most successful collaborators had similar styles, levels of rank, and communication tendencies. Consequently, the members in a collaboration often, and ideally, have varied skillsets. In this instance, Dr. Tunnell performs the bulk of the device manipulations, delving from his PhD in light-based therapeutics, a Post-Doc in light-based cancer detection, and ten years of experience at UT Austin. Dr. Reichenberg, on the other hand, discusses the new procedure with patients and performs clinical trials, while together they must perfect their timing until the two worlds overlap.
These, however, are not the only two skillsets necessary in the competitive world of product production. Shattering the dreamers’ illusion, they told us that if you have a great idea, people do not necessarily come flocking. There is marketing, patenting, and a general sense of convincing that can become forgotten in pure academic research.
As a senior in high school, I completed Engineering Design and Development, a capstone course for the Project Lead the Way national pre-engineering program. In a team of three, we brainstormed problems, performed market research, drafted, and prototyped a partially- automated physical Sorry! game board. Since declaring my major as a biomedical engineer and beginning my experiences in academic research, however, I had never considered the parallels that that research could have to what I considered more industrialized engineering. The most rewarding research, however, is that which is also ultimately applicable in industry, leading to an eventual need for collaboration no matter the setting. And, unlike in school, the partnerships that we will form through our PIs and collaborators will hold meaning for life.
-Sarah Libring, Rutgers
