Peddie EXP 2017

Week 5:                 My P.I. took me to a Japanese restaurant called “Pod” to have a lunch with one of our teachers from the alumni office! We had a great time talking about the progress my lab and I were able to make over summer. Apparently, we got a 3 million-dollar grants for one of our cross-nation clinical trial project. And this is the first time they had ever give so much money to a canine cancer research lab before! So, we are making histories right here. The food there was good too, I ordered something called “Teriyaki beef burger”, I know it sounds like some sort of weird Americanized Japanese food, but it is actually one of the best burger I had ever had. The meat was cooked just right and the sauce they put in the burger was not too salty but had just the right amount of sugar and salt. I had to admit, even though this is the first time I have been to that restaurant, it already became one of my...

Week4:                 PCR, PCR, PCR, this week is just an endless loop of PCR. One big difference that I noticed between what I did in AP Chemistry or AP Biology and what I do in real-life research is that things are much more unpredictable in real life. In the labs made for those AP courses, there are standard protocols, standard instruments, thousands and thousands of other students and teachers had done these labs before, so what we are essentially doing is practicing our lab skill in a path that is already explored. When we do those experiments, we know they will work because that’s how they are supposed to behave. Things are much wilder and much more interesting in the real research field. First of all, you are doing what has never been done before or rarely has been done before by other people. You need to come up with your own protocol, and you need to read a lot of research papers to confirm the liabi...

Week3:                 This week was really exciting since my primer finally showed up at the doorstep right when I entered the lab on Monday. The first step of processing such primer is to reconstitute it. I was really confused by the word “reconstitution” since I have never heard of such word in my entire life. This is actually a common experience since research labs often use very advanced word for very simple idea. And in this case, reconstituting a primer literally means adding water to dissolve the DNA piece that was laying at the bottom of the test tube. I “reconstitute” the primer in the fancy fume hood we got in tissue culture lab. A fume hood is basically a sterile environment that would prevent particles from entering or exiting the hood. Here, since the primer is very delicate and we would not want any contamination to it, we performed the reconstitution process with molecular biology grade water (...

Week 2:                 My P.I. has arrived this week, and she is one of the nicest people I have ever known in my entire life. During the lab meeting on Monday, she even brought us chocolate from London (the best chocolate in the world, according to my P.I.). Together, my P.I. and I had discussed my personal project of the summer: molecular cloning of CD3 epsilon protein. Obviously, our lab’s main goal is to find an effective way to achieve full relapse-free remission in our patients that are suffering from cancer and the instruments we chose to achieve this goal is one of the hottest area currently in immunotherapy: CAR-T cell. The general mechanism behind CAR-T cell is fairly simple. Through electrophoresis or retrovirus, scientists are able to transfer large quantity of mRNA that encodes for CAR receptor into ordinary T cells. Through CAR, we are able to redirect T cell’s specificity against the antigen th...

Week1:                 After a few weeks, I have finally arrived Philadelphia. Things went a bit side track since my kitty scratched me on accident back at home and I need to get vaccinated which would not allow me to go to US till July 18 th . One thing led to another and the result is that I arrived at my lab two weeks later than the plan. But anyways, after the long wait I was really excited to meet my lab member and P.I. My P.I. is currently on a personal vocation in Europe right now and will be back next Monday. Therefore, this week, I worked alongside of Dr. Gunan, the staff member of my lab. First day was always the toughest one. But with the help of Apple map and Upenn’s website, I successfully located Dr. Mason’s lab. The first “task” I had for the lab was making a 0.5 percent agarose gel. It may doesn’t sound hard to all of you who just finished biology but my last biology-related experience was almo...

Well everyone, here we are. The last post. Week 10! I just finished my last day at the lab and am writing this in a word document on the train home. I was so nervous during the past week because this coding project actually ended up being quite difficult with the skills I have. My post-doc and the PI were eager to help on our lab messaging platform, Slack, but it was intimidating at first to send a question in a group chat with the actual head of this computational science lab when I had just started coding a few weeks ago. But once I was eventually pushed off the ledge, I realized that they didn’t think I was some coding prodigy and they knew my skillset, which was extremely comforting. It takes a lot of trial and error, or at least it did for me, and researching what exactly to type to produce your result. At first, I was under the impression that everyone at this lab has the entire Python coding language memorized inside out and backwards, which made me feel a little weird when I ha...

Hey everyone! The next three weeks in my EXP experience take a really interesting turn. I had initially planned to be done with my EXP on July 29th, but in case you haven’t read my last blog post, I decided to extend it to further my understanding and get my hands on some more projects. I chatted with my post-doc Kayla on the 29th and she advised me to operate remotely and do things from home for two weeks, work on the coding course and the proposals, while her and the PI, Nick, craft a project for me to do with some of the knowledge I’ve picked up on coding. The lab uses this great interface called Slack to communicate with each other, there are group chats, individual direct messages, and you are also able to send snippets of code! So that’s what I did for that 7th week, continued editing and revising the medical documents and made sure that they were all ready to be sent off the IRB. I worked on my online coding course, which was really interesting, but a learning curve is definitel...

If any of you had met my mother, then you know that her biggest fear is someone (more often than not, me) being hungry. Going home on the weekends is really nice because I get to spend time with my family and do a lot of fun things, and not to mention we have so many fruits and vegetables that we could probably open our own farmer’s market. Monday mornings, however, usually consist of my mother stuffing my bag to the brim with fruits and snacks and water, until the point where I have to tell her to stop because it won’t all fit. I am not complaining one bit, I actually find it quite funny, but I worry that she worries too much about me being hungry. I don’t know how to convince her that I am okay and that she doesn’t need to give me so much food, but if it makes her feel better to give me all this food, then I’ll let her. Original Histogram of the distribution of pixel intensities. My final weeks in EXP were probably the most exciting and stressful of them all. I had to finish...

As the first days of August emerged, my days at the lab were also coming to an end. Because my lab has a lot of undergraduates who work there for the summer, my PI held a meeting where all the interns could present their experience and their time there. I had a rather short notification on the schedule of the meeting so I only managed to scrap together a short presentation on the jobs I did at the lab. I presented the materials I grew (mainly MoS2) and the experience with the AFM and the annealing that I did in the clean room. I also had some data compiled in the probe station. The data showed that the devices work very consistently, with 80% device working rate. The data yielded is very promising for the future scalable production of these devices. While I was working on my presentation, Ram also showed me some designing of chip and the basic rules that were very interesting. He successfully developed a new model of chip for his paper which would be published in November before hi...

As my week came to an end so did a lot of the summer students. Because so many students were ending and the PI had come back from paternity leave we had a lab presentation where all the summer students presented their experiments and findings from their time there. Having finally finished analyzing and recording all the pup calls I was assigned to do, I could graph the information and make some conclusions. Jenn was at a conference in Brazil for my last week so I was stuck trying to use the graphing program by myself. I use Graphpad prism on windows 98 which I had honestly never seen before. I had no idea what to do or how to even start and the wifi in Brazil was basically useless. But after a few frustrating hours, I was able to input the data and make some helpful graphs.  I made two each for frequency, interval duration, and motif duration (one separated by age and one covering all pup calls). I was looking for any kind of variation either between the ages or ...

One of Ben's Plates I realized for some reason my final blog did not save when I tried uploading it before so here it is now. This was my final week in lab and it came by so fast. I was not ready to leave at all as it had become part of my daily life. The schedule had become so routine and I enjoyed working in a university lab. Ben had been away for two weeks at a conference in England so he had 6 plates of DNA that he needed for genotyping. I planned on finishing most of them this week so that he would not have too much to finish up the rest of the summer. He was trying to work on two projects simultaneously so by completing some of the plates I would make his life a little bit easier.  Loading dye for gel electrophoresis  I ran two plates each day.For each plate I did a pcr which took roughly 2 hours. While the pcr was finishing up, I would make a 1-1.5% gel to run the DNA. After adding the ethidium bromide to the gel, I would let it mix for 10 minutes ...

This past week was my final week at the Seale Lab. It started quite slowly, but the last two days were perhaps the busiest days I had during my time at the lab. So what happened? Monday was quite a slow day. I arrived at the lab at 8:30 AM as usual, and began working on my poster. I continued working until 10:30, when I realized my supervisor still wasn't at the lab. In fact, almost no one was at the lab except me and two undergraduates. I was a bit confused, but I continued working on my poster. Finally, at 1:00, I left the lab. I later got an email from my supervisor saying that I didn't need to be there that day.  On Tuesday, I had a good amount of work to do. I transfected the virus-infected HCT116 cells with p53 and empty pcDNA plasmids. Besides that, I genotyped 20 more mice, and worked on my poster. Wednesday was much like Monday, in that it was a slow day. I worked on my poster once again, and genotyped another 15 or so mice. Additionally, I spent about an hour pre...

Hey guys! I have decided to combine these three weeks in one blog post because I really only go into the lab space two or three times per week, with the rest of my work being done at home. So the reporting on actual lab events is a little scarce. These past three weeks have definitely been interesting. After the big grant was completed, there has definitely been a major shift in the lab’s environment, a lot less tense and overall a better energy. Week 4 started off with a lab meeting involving me, my post-doc Kayla, another student Nick G, and our lab’s PI Nick T, all had a meeting about this metabolomics project. I have been preparing for this meeting essentially for the past three weeks and was ready to discuss. Yet within the first 5 minutes of the meeting, it was clear that the goal of this project was actually changing, which sort of threw me for a loop. But in our project, which is still in its conceptual phase, things are ever-changing. I found out about this document for a pro...

My last week in the lab was all kinds of bitter sweet. I spent most of this week typing data into excel and creating a power point to present my findings to the other lab members in lab meeting. My graduate student helped me make a power point and gave me tips on the type of graphs to use when presenting my findings. Furthermore, I learned how to use excel skillfully to make graphs to plug in data and make graphs. It was very nice seeing all my lab work and research come full circle into a congruent project that I was able to present to very successful individuals. My presentation was Thursday morning and I was extremely nervous. I prepared for many hours the night before in regards to questions that might be asked and making sure I knew all the information and data well. Overall, my presentation went extremely well, as I was able to answer the various questions asked and learned a lot from the other lab members who had tips on how my research could be expanded. My graduate student...

And just like that, my seven and a half weeks at Temasek Polytechnic are over! While my EXP summer internship wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be, it was through this experience that I learned many valuable lessons and that I will be sure to bring back to Peddie. I also got to meet some amazing people, whom I can now hang out with when I come back here in future. I still have some work cut out for me during the rest of the time I have in Singapore, and for that matter, the rest of the summer, as I am still awaiting some results from the lab to come through. However, looking back, I am in a much better position now than I was in a couple weeks ago. I would like to thank Dr. Wuang for allowing me to join her research group for the past summer, as well as Mr. Sham and Dr. Peretz for their support in the months leading up to the internship. Thank you to my supervisor Pok Siang for his guidance, and Kit Lun for giving me a hand when I needed it. Shout out to all the folks back...

I am very grateful to be able to have the opportunity to do EXP.   I came across so many people along the way, such as other people in my lab, strangers on the train, and people I met while shopping or eating lunch that truly made me realize how great EXP is.   Everybody was always so shocked that I was in high school, commuting every day to Penn and interning at a lab.   Their first response was either “wait, you’re in high school?” or “wow you must be really smart”.   At Peddie, EXP is just so normal to apply to and look forward to for junior year, but once you really go out in the real world, meet people, and tell them about your experience, it opens your eyes to the real opportunity that we have.   I will forever be grateful for EXP.   Sure, there were some challenges, such as my PI being absent a lot and always getting lost in the building and delays on the train (Septa was such a struggle sometimes), but overall these difficulties were not nearly...