Will Wikoff, Week 1, The Start of an Epic Journey

Where is it? That is the question.

The CARL building is just behind the Jones building. That is the answer.

Where is the CARL building? This is the question that raced through my head at 9:50am Monday, June 12^th.    Last week I finally started and settled into the Matsunami lab at Duke.  At first I was nervous about several things: where is the lab, who will I meet, and if I am prepared enough (I only found the Matsunami lab in late April).  I am now glad to say that my transition into the lab was very quick and easy, and that all of my fears stemmed from some unfounded idea that labs are places where geniuses hustle around in lab coats with chemicals and are unable to slow down to mentor a high school student.

On my very first day after talking to Dr. Matsunami I was given my very first task: talk to everyone individually for at least thirty minutes, and that is what I did.  For the first six hours of being in that lab I went around striking conversations with whoever did not look too busy and asked them about themselves and what they were researching.  This helped me get to know everyone right away, rather, it forced me to.  Now I know who is a grad student and who is a post doctorate (I swear they look the same), now I know the lab members who arrive at 9am vs those at 11am as well as those who leave at 4pm vs those at 6pm, heck I even know everyone’s stance on pineapple on pizza.  Only now while writing this blogpost a mere week and two days after I started am I realizing how quickly I have become accustomed to this new community of mine.  

In addition to meeting everyone, by learning about everyone’s projects Dr. Matsunami let me choose who I will work with.  So that brings up the question: what have I been doing week one?  I primarily did three different things.  First, I learned the ins and outs of the lab.  Working with the lab manager, Jessica, I have become accustomed to the various rooms in the building (such as the cold room where we store DNA samples).  In addition to showing me around, Jessica has been teaching and testing me on various basic lab techniques necessary to help in this lab.  I have been sequencing DNA nearly nonstop since day 2—whether it is preparing plasmids or blasting on ncbi.

"The Cold Room"

My Lab Bench

Making Agarose Gels 

Secondly, I have been reading a ton; on Thursday I picked up a human physiology textbook off of the shelf in the lab and it was so big it probably could have killed a small child if it fell.  I also have about three more papers that I have to read that my grad student mentor, Serene, gave me. 

Third, I was given a project to work on in my free time while not training.  Serene works with mice and studies their behavior in response to certain odors which trigger their innate fight or flight response.  Currently she has been observing the mice in the daylight but has run into a problem: mice are nocturnal.  Since mice are nocturnal and act sluggish during the day her findings are not an accurate representation of how a mice would react in nature.  My job for week 1 was to design a space in Serene’s fume hood to observe these mice in a nocturnal environment.  My plan is to block out the light of the fume hood window using blackout curtains and flood the room with red light (I found that mice cannot perceive red light so to them it looks pitch black) and record them with a normal camera (or if it is too dim a thermographic camera).  I presented my findings and my plan to Dr. Matsunami this Friday and he did not shoot down any of my ideas so I think I did well. 

So far I think everything is going great, I look forward to the weeks and projects to come.