July 26, 2018, Filed Under: 2018, graduate school, learning, reflectionsGraduate School Hi, my name is Donovan Moses, a rising sophomore studying materials science and engineering at Penn State University. Participating in this research experience here at UT Austin has made me think about what I actually want to do in the future and graduate school is definitely an option on the list. My thoughts about graduate school and research started out as two very separate categories. I always thought that in graduate school I would have to take classes and it was just be an extension of what I’m doing in my undergraduate career. Research was just something extra that could be done on the side and maybe I didn’t even have to worry about it. This summer I learned how intertwined graduate school and research are and this made going to graduate school much more appealing to me. Photo of mouse brain vasculature; one of the challenges of the summer is to remove noisy data from the image through processing in MATLAB Over the summer I got to experience the everyday activities of a graduate student. I come in everyday and I might not have a set schedule for the day but there is a problem to solve and my job is to figure out how to solve it. I enjoy this type of work because it feels like I’m making a significant impact on difficult and relevant problems everyday. This REU has helped me realize that I want to go to graduate school so that I can change the world through my work. -Donovan Moses, Penn State University
July 3, 2018, Filed Under: 2018, cancer, reflections, researchReflecting on Research Hi, I’m Josh, a rising sophomore at Johns Hopkins University majoring in Biomedical Engineering and a part of the UT Austin BME CURes Cancer REU. Although our lab is currently in the “set up phase” of my project, much progress has been made. Our experiment itself is two-fold: part wet lab, part dry lab, and I have learned to enjoy the breaks that each one gives the other. This is the type of analysis our lab performs where we take the percentage of cells that are alive after a certain dose of treatment and fit them to a curve using Matlab. My project involves using the process of EMT (Epithelial to Mesenchymal transition) to predict the effect of matrix stiffness on chemotherapy resistance in mammalian cancer cells. Like I mentioned, we are currently in the setup phase: seeding, lasing, dosing, and performing live/dead assays in order to test the effect of a wider range of matrix stiffnesses on chemotherapy resistance using Dose/Response curves. In these pictures, we are seeding 5 mM gels in preparation to dose and eventually perform a live/dead assay on them. Our lab hopes to develop a mechanistic model that predicts the effect matrix stiffness has on drug resistance due to a change in the proportion of mesenchymal cells. This can be detected through confocal imaging by marking certain transcription factors like YAP. This lab has taught me much more than to follow protocols. It has given me the ability to be independent and understand that I enjoy exploring new topics I am not caught up on in the scientific community. I am suddenly gaining critical skills like reading published papers, and without the great flexibility of my mentors and PI, I would never be able to gain these tools that I will definitely need down the road. Excited to see what results the month of July holds! -Joshua Krachman, Johns Hopkins University
July 28, 2017, Filed Under: 2017, cancer, reflectionsCancer Research Update As the summer dwindles down, we can reflect on the progress that has been made throughout the summer. Not only have we developed lasting friendships, improved our scientific communication skills, and explored Austin, but we have conducted seven weeks of research! Working at the lab has brought out the best in us and has made us immerse ourselves, not only into research papers, but into lab life. On a daily basis, we have gone in and out of lab, each day learning a new concept, new ideas, and having many questions as we walked out. We may now proceed to the next step and present all that we have learned and what has yet to be discovered. As for me, I’m just attempting to add a little contribution to the large pool of cancer research. Throughout this summer, I have worked in a medical device laboratory, attempting to develop a catheter for convection enhanced delivery to glioblastomas. So far, convection enhanced delivery is causing backflow of the infused therapeutics. In order to solve this problem, I have been trying to create a pressure driven system. So far, I have been able to narrow down a pressure range in which there is no backflow during infusions. Thankfully, the results that I have been collecting prove that the volume distributed is still optimal while diminishing the amount of backflow shown. Now we can proceed to develop a system that can computationally keep a consistent pressure throughout an infusion. The image displays the distribution patterns of the infusate and demonstrates no reflux. I took this image at the lab during one of my experiments. -Bianca Montano, University of Texas at El Paso
