Hi guys!
I’m Swasty, a rising
senior majoring in Neuroscience. I am
currently spending my summer at the Goldman Laboratory in The University of
Rochester in NY. My summer lab focuses on glial and neuronal disorders, which
could be treatable through a greater understanding of glial and neuronal
progenitor cells. For my project, I will focus on the remyelination of
hypomyelinated shiverer mice via neonatal engraftment of human glial progenitor
cells. I will (potentially—due to the
brevity of my time here) be studying the infiltration patterns and
proliferation of human glial progenitor cells as well as myelination of native
hypomyelinated cells within the brains of shiverer mice injected with one of
two different classes of sorted cells, with hopes to find a “better” marker
with which to select hGPCs by. I must admit I was scared to go to another lab,
because I got lucky with my lab and mentorship back at UCLA, but it has been a
pretty smooth transition. The only difficulty is that I will only be here for 6
weeks, 3 of which have already passed. I
will start imaging and quantifying stuff tomorrow. Fingers crossed I get some good data!! As a
side note, I brought up CLARITY with my mentor and she pointed me in the
direction of someone in the lab who wanted to work on it as well! Another
undergrad and I have been working under him on troubleshooting the equipment
needed for active clearing as a side project.
Unfortunately, I’ll probably be gone by the time this project takes offL Also,
people here wear shorts and eat/drink in the lab… I might come back to UCLA
with some bad lab habits.
Outside of lab, I
participate in anatomy lectures, labs, problem based learning and many other
events put together by the lovely SURF program.
Coming in two weeks after the program start date, I was intimidated by
meeting the cohort and acclimating to the program alone, however everyone here
has been amazingly friendly. I have met awesome people in and out of lab and it
has really made my experience an extremely positive one.
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The campus is beautiful!
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Getting creative naming our test brains
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3 comments:
Hi Swasty,
I'm interested to see how your CLARITY work came together. I know it's a very interesting technique. Also, it seems like your program is keeping you very busy. I'd like to know how those classes were.
Cheers,
Abel
Swasty,
Wow, your project seems really cool, it's a bummer you can't stay longer. I am sure you would've enjoyed it. I hope you learn as much as you can. The campus looks pretty! Have fun.
Best,
Rob
Swasty,
It sounds like you made an awesome transition and did some new things in the lab. Having different kinds of lab experiences is very important and I know you have grown so much from it. Also, you get to see a place like Rochester and now you know it is a pretty nice place.
Dr. SImmons
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