Peddie EXP 2017

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...