Deja Cunningham, Week 1, Training, Training, Training!

Edwin L. Jones Research Building (My lab)

My first week at Duke has been both exciting and tedious. I first entered my lab last Monday at 9 am and began my experience by going to a lab meeting. My PI introduced me to the rest of the lab members who I would possibly be working with. My lab is pretty small.  There are a total of 7 people including me, the PI, a lab technician, two PhD students, a grad student, and a post doc. They were all very welcoming and were surprised by how many techniques I had already known how to do (thanks to biotech!). The lab meeting was about two hours long and consisted of the lab members presenting on the progress/new discoveries of their project. In the beginning, I understood a small part of each of their projects, but after a while it all sounded pretty foreign to me. I was at least a little proud that I could understand pieces of it. After the lab meeting, my PI Dr. Shinohara showed me around the lab and told me all the things I needed to do before I could start working.

 My lab station                                            Part of the lab

The first order of business was to get my Duke ID so that I would have access to different buildings and a key to have access to all of the lab rooms. This surprisingly took three days. Then, I needed to get an email account and net ID to have access to the secure duke websites (which was where all my online training was). This took a day. Once I received it, I was able to complete all of my online training (7!) in an orderly fashion. Most of the time while I was waiting, I watched different techniques that the lab members were performing and I even micropipetted a couple of solutions for mice genotyping.

The PhD student Elizabeth showed me how to use the flow cytometry machine, which is like the patriarch of all immunology machines. This is used to compare different characteristics of immune cells and plot it on a graph. It does this by sucking up the cells from a test tube and arranging the cells in a single file line in order to shoot lasers at it. These lasers target different markers on the cells of interest. Elizabeth in addition showed me how she dissects mice to take out the spleen. She then preforms cell culturing in order to extract the white blood cells from it. Lastly, she showed me how she extracts the spinal chord from the mice, which is very important to her research surrounding EAE (Autoimmune Enchaphalomyelitis-the mice model of Multiple Sclerosis).The other PhD student Will also showed me some techniques that he does for his research. He explained to me what an emulsion is, which is a solution of water and oil with dead strains of tuberculosis. He uses this in order to initiate EAE in the mice. This solution is injected into the mice as a vaccine. During the week, he took me to the mice lab, and showed me how he performs this procedure on his 10 mice! The mice lab is directly across from my building and can only be entered in with an ID. Before entering, we had to completely cover our body with gloves, face mask, hair net, bodysuit, and shoe covers since it is completely sterile inside. It was so cool!

When I'm not in the lab, I explore Duke's campus and what the Durham area has to offer. Often times during the week I would go out to lunch at Duke's West Union with Keeley and her friend named Shawn, a college student at Dartmouth working in her lab. On the weekend, we went to the pool at the WaDuke (Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club-where Shawn is staying) and went to Defy Gravity, which is an indoor trampoline park. We ended the weekend with a trip to a local ice cream place called The Parlour, which is a 10/10 I definitely recommend!

The Parlour in Downtown Durham

I'm supposed to receive my project next week so I'm definitely looking forward to what week 2 has to offer!!!