With one more week left in my internship, I have been spending some time recounting my experiences and thinking about how they have helped me grow as a student, researcher, and person. Research I loved being in a space surrounded by people who were challenging previous assumptions and asking a variety of questions to narrow…
The past seven weeks at the Wu Orr Lab have zipped past me so quickly. It feels like just yesterday that we were attending the Boston Bacterial Meeting and setting up our goals for this summer. And although I may not have been able to fully analyze all 32 of my mutant strains before I…
Still image from a numerical simulation of a black hole / neutron star merger. Image credit: S.V.Chaurasia (Stockholm University), T. Dietrich (Potsdam University and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), N. Fischer, S. Ossokine, H. Pfeiffer (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), ,https://www.ligo.org/detections/NSBH2020/files/BHNS_GW200115.png. Scientists have long predicted that neutron stars and black holes could orbit…
I participated in the Stowers Summer Scholars program this summer and have gotten a good amount of advice from people I’ve talked to during its duration. Upon reflecting on my summer, I have decided to share a list of the advice, information, and realizations I have found valuable. 1. You need to figure out what…
Image courtesy of Vecteezy. Web Vectors by Vecteezy With the summer still far from over (right?!), the past couple months have been both valuable and satisfying. It would be misleading to say that this summer went by quickly, because the time I spent working in Professor Totton’s lab sticks with me. The three projects I…
From “,https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7007-12-7” When you’re faced with weighty decisions like where to attend school or work full-time, you may naturally wonder what the location you will settle down at is really like. Ideally, you’d get to visit the location and see what it’s like for yourself. To ultimately make a good decision, you will need to…
Photo courtesy of City of Toronto Twitter account (@cityoftoronto) In order to give some background on my research this summer, I thought it made sense to discuss a paper written by my internship professor. In 2019, Rebecca Totton and Kimberly Rios published “,Predictors of anti-transgender attitudes: Identity-confusion and deception as aspects of distrust.” This paper…
Prior to starting my internship, I thought of bones as rigid structures. I was surprised to learn about all the action that occurs beneath the bone surface! In this video, I use animations to break down how bone develops and adapts over time, also known as bone dynamics….
Model organisms are non-human species that scientists use to study biological mechanisms. They should be easy to grow, mature quickly, have lots of offspring, and have a sequenced genome. Some of the most popular model organisms are yeast, house mice, fruit flies, worms, and zebrafish. Different organisms have unique traits that make studying specific processes…
In my opinion, one of the most amazing things that biologists do is peer into the past by imagining what animals once looked like and how the animals of today are related to each other. If the molecular biological and phylogenetic concepts that biologists use were artistic media, their canvas would be their organism of…