Author Archives: Aitana Zermeno

These past two months of research have flown by much faster than I expected, and that is probably because it feels like my research is just beginning. Although I am not sure yet whether I want to do research as a career, I do know that I want to continue throughout my undergraduate years.

Through the Howard Hughes Research Fellowship I have learned so much about science, academia, possible careers, and how my own personality fits into all of the above. For example, I’ve realized that my detail-oriented, “perfectionist” nature fits well with research, but that at the same time I can become easily stressed out when I feel like I’ve messed something up. However, I’ve learned that messing up is a huge part of science, and that everyone does it. Whether it was not putting enough media into my cell culture dish or not proofreading my final poster thoroughly enough, I’m walking away from these 2 months with plenty of lessons to take with me. Aside from these lessons, I have garnered so many valuable tools that will stay with me well beyond this summer. I now have research experience and a personal relationship with my PI and secondary mentor, both of whom I feel extremely blessed to have been paired with for this program.

Looking to the future, I am excited to spend the next semester (and hopefully many more) working in the Ferreira lab, continuing with related projects and learning more about what it means to do research. The project I have spent so much time on these past 2 months has genuinely piqued my interest, and I can’t wait for more!

Every week we have been fortunate enough to have a few different Duke faculty members speak to us about their research, and more importantly, how they got into their research. Researchers are definitely busy people, so I feel lucky to have been given some time from their schedules during which they explain what we wouldn’t have time to hear in a content-packed lecture: their personal stories.

While I loved hearing from all of the faculty members, my favorite was the message that Dr. Brian Coggins left with us. It was refreshing to hear a fairly “normal” path for deciding a career choice… A combination of good science teachers in high school and an inherent curiosity led him to yearn for a personal, direct experience with science.  Growing up, he browsed National Geographic magazines and loved figuring out how machines worked. At Duke (where he earned both his B.S. and PhD), professor Dr. Dave McClay got him interested in biochemistry. He trusted his interest in science and has stuck with it to this day.

In his own words, “Sometimes you have to just make a decision and go with it.” I find this to be so relevant at this 18 year-old time in my life, because it can be so overwhelming thinking about planning for the future. “The future” can feel so far off yet so immediate. We are told, “You have time to figure out what you want to do,” and simultaneously, “You need to start preparing now and planning your future.” So my biggest take-away from Dr. Coggins’ talk is to trust your  gut, and to prepare for the future simply by doing activities that you love. Reminding us how limited our time at Duke is, he encouraged us to take not just the important, useful courses but also to take interesting, more random ones, because they could lead to a career choice. He assured us that when we pick a career, the learning will come. He had not taken computer science courses or high-level math courses during his undergraduate years, but was able to learn what he needed to when he needed to.

Dr. Coggins is not only someone who loves science, but is able to articulate the causes underlying his passion for it. In response to the question he has probably been asked many times before, “Why do you love science?” he was able to list off in a few minutes, “Variety, puzzles, independence, collaboration, changing the world” as the specific qualities of science that have drawn him in. As for me, even if my future career does not entail reading astronomy papers from the 1900s or using computers to understand artifact suppression, I will keep Dr. Coggins’ talk in mind when pondering my options beyond undergraduate education.

Now that I am 6 weeks into my research and do not yet have conclusive results, I understand what Dr. Grunwald meant when we said at the start of the program that we should not be expecting to finish a thesis-worthy project in our 8 short weeks.

The time has flown by, probably because there is always something to do in the lab. I am beginning to see how repetitive research needs to be in order to verify preliminary results. In our lab we are testing 14 different compounds, and a few of them have been shown (or rather, suggested) by our experiments to be in line with our hypothesis. For each compound we do several different tests, and many times we do not get groundbreaking results. I’ve realized this isn’t something to be upset about, and I’ve come to really appreciate the persistent, cautious attitude that my secondary mentor, Dr. Kyoungin Cho, displays at all times in the lab. Rather than jumping to any conclusions, she always says, “We will need to run more tests to verify the result.”

Even though the routine is becoming repetitive, I do not mind doing the same experiments over and over. I am learning to appreciate a few things about this repetitiveness. Above all else, I feel assured that I am being taught very careful, precise research techniques. My PI constantly warns me not to get complacent with my lab habits because this can lead to poor results in the end. He uses a cooking analogy, saying that if he gave a recipe to 2 people, it would taste differently depending on who cooked it. Just like doing each step of recipe carefully culminates in a delicious end product, being meticulous in each step of an experiment will ensure accurate results and prevent mishaps.

Overall, I have really enjoyed the past month and a half. Yes, the project takes a long time, and no, we are not 100% positive we will even get the successful results we would like. However, I have enjoyed every bit of the learning process. I am proud to say I have earned my secondary mentor’s trust in performing many parts of the experiment without her supervision, and I know that it is because I have been fortunate enough to have a teacher as heedful as she is.

Hearing my peers explain their research this past week was quite a treat. Not only did I get to learn more about what everyone has been spending the majority of their time doing for the past month, but I also got to appreciate how far we have all come in such a short amount of time in understanding what research is like.

In particular, I really appreciated Erin’s project. What struck me as fascinating about this project is how research projects can use extremely specific techniques to target a hugely applicable question. Erin explained that biologists care about 4 major parts of cell life: apoptosis, DNA methylation, DNA replication, and movement. Her project has a seemingly simple topic: to understand these processes better. To do this, her lab team uses fluorescent proteins fused to nanobodies. Those nanobodies target specific antigens, and the colors can then be seen under a confocal microscope to better understand the 4 processes listed above. Specifically, to learn more about cell shape they target actin, to learn more about DNA replication they target PCNA, to learn more about DNA methylation they target DNMT, and to learn more about the nucleus they target lamin.

As I sat listening to this talk I thought of all of the time Erin must spend in a dark room with a confocal microscope looking at the same teal, orange, yellow, and blue colors. More importantly, I thought about how worth it those hours of imaging would feel once serious conclusions are reached, and some part of nature that was previously less-understood is now that bit more-understood. It is the accumulation of these tiny bits of better understanding that lead in the long run to humans living healthier happier lives, with the body better understood. Science in this way transcends from the micro level of looking at colored cells under a microscope to learning more about how we can keep ourselves and future children from hearing the c-word at a doctor’s visit.

There is not one “typical day” in the lab for me, which I like. By not knowing exactly what to expect for that particular day, the lab routine does not become monotonous. Although each day is different, there are a few things that can be strung together to describe a normal day in the lab.

For starters, there are the lab techniques and protocols that I follow routinely as part of my project. Pretty much every day, I check on the cells that I have been growing to see how much they’ve grown and if they need to be divided soon. If they are looking very confluent (filling the dish with little space between cells), I divide them and keep a portion of the cells to passage (to continue growing). For most of the rest of the day I do a western blot technique which is used to transfer  proteins (which have been separated via gel electrophoresis) onto a membrane. While these might sound like boring protocols, I find it exciting to look at the cell culture dishes under the microscope and see the cells connected to each other, with what looks like outstretched arms holding hands. And going into the darkroom to develop film from the western blot keeps me alert, as I have to be extremely careful not to let any light seep into the film.

Aside from lab techniques, there are other lab activities that have become normal. Learning precise techniques and laughing at the same time with my secondary mentor, Kyoung-in, has made my days equally lighthearted and intensive. My PI, Dr Ferreira, adds to this atmosphere as he frequently walks around to talk to everyone at their respective lab benches, whether the conversation is about the World Cup or about how to improve my Chalk Talk.

Lastly, as a typical college student, it is important to note one last routine I have become accustomed to: on Fridays there is free food.

In the past few years I’ve become very interested in vision, so I have been really enjoying my time working in Dr. Ferreira’s opthalmology lab. Ophthalmology is the branch of medicine pertaining to eye diseases, and Dr. Ferreira’s work focuses mainly on the retina, which is the part of the eye located in the back (toward the brain) that takes in light. The “big picture” aim of the lab is to understand how certain interactions among proteins modulate retinal diseases (e.g. age-related macular degeneration).

Specifically, Dr. Ferreira and his lab team are interested in a protein called the RanBP2 protein, which is very large and has many different domains with diverse binding activity. The lab studies how one domain of this protein binds different partners, and how different domains of the protein cross-talk to enable or inhibit these bindings from happening.

For the project I am helping with, I get to do experiments with one possible signaling partner to the domain of interest on the RanBP2 protein. The real experiment will be to provide different drugs and see how they affect activation, but first we have to pretreat the cells and make sure that they will live. To this end, I have been learning and performing cell culture and western blot techniques. Cell culture is the process of expanding and maintaining a population of cells, growing them stably in an ideal environment so that the cell’s behavior can be studied in isolation from other tissues. Western blot is a technique that detects specific proteins, and we can use it to determine whether the protein of interest blocks or binds to specific molecules.

Hopefully by the end of these 8 weeks, I will have a firmer grasp on what and how exactly I am studying in my project, but in the mean time I am learning a lot  from textbooks about how vision works, I am learning a lot in the lab about how research works, and I am putting these two together in my brain to learn how  research connects to and shapes what I learn in the textbook.

This past week I had the pleasure of meeting one-on-one with my PI (primary investigator of the lab), Dr. Ferreira. During our meeting I got to learn about the events that have led him to where he is today.

Growing up, Dr. Ferreira was surrounded by physicians. From a young age, he loved science. He recalls being given a microscope to play with at 6 years old, and being fascinated by the sight of human cells up close. In school his favorite subject was always biology, but diseases especially intrigued him. Through this upbringing he noticed that many doctors didn’t always know the answers for why things happened in the body. His curious nature wouldn’t allow him to follow a regimen without questioning why, and for this reason research has suited him very well. When his friend died of cancer, he became further interested in studying how human diseases work in hopes of finding information that could be useful in the prevention or treatment of them.

Dr. Ferreira explained to me that growing up in Portugal, the education system was elite-based, with few going to college and even fewer earning degrees. With a revolution in science occurring (In the 70’s and 80’s microbiology was a hot new topic), Dr. Ferreira found it best to leave Portugal and come to the US. At 28 years old he made the big move and spent a summer researching at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in a program similar to the Howard Hughes Research Fellowship. This was a turning point for him in his decision to pursue research, and he credits his “really good mentors” with pushing him in this direction.

He went on to earn his PhD from Purdue University, and expresses that he enjoyed teaching premed classes during graduate school. To him, being a TA was refreshing because it gave him positive social interaction with the students and gave him practice transmitting knowledge through good communication.

When I prompted him the typical question, “What do you like about being a researcher?” he responded that along with the way it feeds his scientific curiosity, he loves the independent nature of his work. He loves that he cannot get too used to following one routine over and over, and advises me to never become complacent if I want to improve.

My favorite part of our conversation, though, was when he advised me outright, “Knowing too much can be bad.” I was surprised by this and asked him why. He explained that in science, a combination of naivety and ingenuity can sometimes be a recipe for success. He explained that since science is always changing, sometimes if you believe too strongly what you have been taught, your perspective might be based on false premises.

Now I understand why, at work, he constantly reminds me not to take for granted what I read and to keep an open mind. It is only two weeks into this program, and I am being taught not only good lab techniques, but perhaps more importantly, the mental attitude that will bring me success in a scientific career.

After walking up Research Drive, through the construction-friendly side entrance of the Duke Eye Center, and up 4 flights of stairs to the top of the Albert Eye Research Institute, I stuck my lunch baggie in the kitchen fridge and headed into the Ferreira Ophthalmology Lab for my first day in the Howard Hughes Research Fellowship.

At the end of the day I came home mentally exhausted, but excited for the weeks ahead. I had spent the day getting acquainted with the lab, and my extremely helpful PI (Principal Investigator), Dr. Ferreira, kept bringing me various textbooks throughout the day and opening them to point out the chapters I would find most helpful in understanding the work he specializes in, and in which I am lucky to take part this summer.

Dr. Ferreira’s research focuses on the retina, which is the part at the back of the eye that receives light and then transmits the visual information onto the brain to create the view that we see.

To me vision is fascinating and the most essential of the senses, so getting to spend time in this lab is an invaluable opportunity for me. The expectation that I am holding myself to is rather broad: I want to walk down those 4 flights at the end of the summer with a solid feel for the working environment in a research lab and having developed solid relationships with the members of that lab who have already been so generous and patient with the research newbie (that’s me).

Learning to pipette in the Ferreira Laboratory

So now as the first week comes to a close, and having heard my lab project explained to me 3 times, I am beginning to be able to vocalize the gist of it. It might not seem like much, but to me it’s a great start and I can’t wait to see how much I can understand by the end of these 2 months!