Author Archives: Dani Smith

Looking Back Before Moving Forward

As the summer comes to an end, it is finally hitting me that I have to return to the harsh reality of classes soon. So instead of worrying about the semester ahead of me, I am choosing to reflect on my experiences this summer.

Although I was nervous before the Howard Hughes Program began, I am so thankful for what I have learned this summer, both about the lifestyle of a professional researcher and about myself. My summer lab experience allowed me to see firsthand what it is like to have a research career. While the days are often long and frustrating, it is incredibly rewarding to obtain that dataset or the results that you were hoping for. Although I am still unsure whether I will pursue a research career, I am now definitely planning on pursuing a Ph.D. after today’s career panel. Unfortunately, I am also reconsidering going to medical school now, so I still have a lot of decisions to make in the coming years.

There are two things that I am particularly grateful to this program for: the useful connections that I have made with my mentors and other investigators at Duke and the change in my perspective on science as a collaborative field. After sitting down with my PI today to discuss the coming semester and if I would continue at the lab, I realized that Dr. Patek truly cared about my future in her lab and my future as a researcher. She told me that while she would like me to remain involved in the lab, if I wanted to transfer labs she would also be more than willing to help with that process. When Dr. Patek told me this, I was stunned by how much she truly seemed to care about me finding success as an undergraduate researcher, and I am truly grateful to have had her as a mentor this summer. In addition, this summer opened my eyes to the collaboration that is involved in science nowadays. Everyone in my lab has a different specialty and their own projects that they work on, but they are constantly asking each other questions about their projects and other researchers from different departments stop by frequently to chat about a project that they are conducting with one of the lab members. I love this aspect of research, because I find it much more beneficial to step outside of one’s comfort zone and look at things from various perspectives. Science is truly a community, and I am glad that this program opened my eyes to the exciting opportunities that will come in the next three years.

Reassurance

I have never been a morning person. I generally don’t schedule classes before 10am during the year, because I know that I have a difficult time getting myself to pay attention to anything in the mornings. That being said, I had no trouble throughout this program being attentive during the morning seminars because they were such a wonderful resource that I didn’t want to miss out on any of them. Hearing professional researchers speak about the paths that they took to get to their current positions was both inspiring and reassuring because many of them either had no idea what career they wanted to pursue when they started college or they quickly changed their minds after discovering science. At a university like Duke, it is often disheartening to be undecided about your major, simply because so many students around me already seem to know exactly what they want to do in life. Obviously, they might (and probably will) change their minds at some point, but I still often find myself wishing that I were in their shoes. Therefore, hearing so many successful researchers talk about how they were in my exact position in college was extremely encouraging to hear.

In addition, these seminars were a wonderful opportunity to hear about the incredible research being conducted at Duke and about how to get involved with that research as an undergraduate. One of my favorite seminars was the talk given by Dr. Susan Alberts, who happens to work down the hall from the Patek lab. I had been introduced to Dr. Alberts on my first day in the Patek lab and had spoken to her multiple times, but it wasn’t until her seminar that I really got an idea of the research that she is working on. I have always had an interest in behavioral biology, so it was very interesting to hear about her work studying the behavior of baboons in Kenya and the field work that her team conducts sounds like such an incredible and immersive experience. I also took an Intro to Evolutionary Anthropology class last semester, so I enjoyed being able to apply the concepts I had learned in that course to Dr. Alberts’s seminar.

The Beginnings of Analysis

After six weeks in the Patek lab, I feel at home in the basement of the Biological Sciences building. In addition to feeling comfortable with my lab colleagues, I have also gotten to know the other researchers located nearby. I have been hard at work trying to finish digitizing the photographs that my mentor and I took at the Smithsonian, and I am very close to finishing that task. In fact, this week marked the end of this digitizing. Unfortunately, the moment that I started to celebrate my completion of this task, the computer program glitched and erased a large chunk of my data. Therefore, I will have to go back and redo that work in the next week or so, and the results from my poster will be largely preliminary because we will not be including that data.

That being said, I am currently taking a break from the digitizing in order to find the preliminary results for my poster. I am excited to start analyzing this data and start to see the results of the work that I have been doing for the last three weeks or so. Right now, I am reviewing the various statistical analyses that we will be using on the data sets so that next week I will have a better understanding of what these computer programs are actually doing.

The Science Behind Music

This week’s presentations were a great way for all of us to finally figure out what in the world everyone else in this program is spending their days doing. And one project in particular really caught my eye, partially because I love music but also because it was one of the few non-medical projects. Wilson’s project is all about studying the physical movements of playing piano and how that can tell us the neurological processes behind playing an instrument. Using people with varying levels of experience with the piano, they film the subject playing whatever sequence they just learned. They can then use this film to study how much the test subject anticipates the notes that are next. For example, if the subject knows what notes are coming and is anticipating the movements, he/she tends to set their hands in an optimal position to reach those notes during the notes that come beforehand, so that the test subject can minimize the amount that he/she has to move. In addition, Wilson’s lab is also tracking how hard each of the notes are hit, which can also demonstrate how much the test subject is anticipating the notes because if you are stressed about not knowing which notes come next you are less likely to be able to hit the keys softly even when the music requires it.

I grew up playing piano, and like most other kids my age I eventually made the terrible decision to stop playing. However, I still love sitting down at the piano from time to time and trying random songs. In addition, my father is an amazing piano player, so I have always loved listening to him play. While sometimes I feel as though studying the science behind things such as dance and music goes against the purpose of these things, it is also fascinating to attempt to unravel the mystery of how our brains interpret and learn these practices. Therefore, I loved hearing about what Wilson is working on this summer.

The Art of Digitizing

Now that I have comfortably settled into my routine at the Patek lab, my days have drastically changed since my first week in the lab. During my introduction to the lab, I spent most of my days reading papers that the lab had published, talking through them with my immediate supervisor, and attempting to orient myself with my lab and my colleagues in the lab. However, since our trip to the Smithsonian where we gathered many photographs of mantis shrimp specimens, my days are a bit different now.

I generally arrive at the lab around 10am, depending on if we have had a Howard Hughes meeting that morning. I spend my first five minutes in lab unpacking my laptop, charger, water bottle, and the tablet that has become my best friend over the last couple of weeks. After everything is plugged in, I dive right into digitizing the photographs that we took at the Smithsonian. This basically involves placing dots along the various parts of the mantis shrimp’s appendage, so that a computer program can later compare all of the photographs against each other. While this task takes up the bulk of my days lately, I also enjoy taking breaks every once in a while to talk through problems with the other lab members and I help with filming high-speed videos of one of the mantis shrimp every once in a while.

One thing that I did not expect going into this experience was how relaxed the lab’s atmosphere is. While everyone spends their days working on their own projects, if anyone in the lab is stuck on their problem the other members of the lab are always more than happy to try to help. Often when I look up from my lab bench, I see a few of my colleagues standing in front of a white board together discussing something related to one of the projects within the lab. In addition, during our weekly lab meetings, everyone constantly asks for ideas from the other lab members and takes their colleagues’ suggestions to heart. For example, last Friday I gave my practice Chalk Talk to everyone in my lab, and afterwards they all gave me great input on how I could improve my talk and they really boosted my confidence and made me feel like part of the team. I have greatly enjoyed my experience in the lab so far, and I can’t wait to see what happens in my next month here.

Mantis Shrimp Development

While I am working in the lab this summer, I will be spending the majority of my time digitizing the photographs of mantis shrimp appendages that my immediate supervisor, Dr. Phil Anderson, and I took during our trip to the Smithsonian last week. What I mean by digitizing is that I will go through all of the photographs and place landmarks on the mantis shrimp’s appendages. Then, after I have done this for every photo, I enter the data file into a program that will rotate and resize the pictures in order to more precisely compare the photos and the morphological differences between the various specimens. Although this task can get a bit monotonous at times, I am actually very excited because Dr. Patek bought a touchscreen tablet for me to use with my computer to help prevent myself from getting injured from the repetitive motion. The tablet is an amazing piece of technology, and I love using it on a daily basis.

Anyways, this digitizing will help our lab have a better idea of how the appendages of mantis shrimp develop. We developed multiple hypotheses of which parts of the appendage we believe will be more correlated than others, and using a Mantel test we can analyze the correlation between the different hypotheses and the data that we collected. Hopefully, one of these hypotheses will fit the data set more accurately than the others, and we can conclude that that model is a good representation of the developmental modularity of these creatures. An earlier member of the Patek lab did a similar study a few years ago, but he was studying a different type of mantis shrimp. Therefore, this project will help us get a more complete picture of what goes on during the development of these amazing creatures.

The Struggle to Become a Scientist

Sitting down with Dr. Sheila Patek for this interview, it was clear to me how much this scientist loves her work. She carved the time for this interview out of an incredibly busy schedule, running from meeting to meeting in order to fulfill all of her duties as a professor and researcher here at Duke University. Her scientific career began at Harvard University, where she completed her undergraduate education as a biology major. Being the only scientist in her family, she wanted to somehow combine the fields of physics, math, and biology, but she had no idea how to accomplish this. According to Dr. Patek, the initial years of her career involved a lot of knocking of doors, trying to find professors’ office hours, and a lot of rejection. It wasn’t until she took a class with Dr. Karel Liem, who taught a course on the biology of fishes. Dr. Liem played a major role in founding a field where you connect morphology and mechanics with behavior and evolution, a field that Dr. Patek quickly fell in love with.

After Harvard, Dr. Patek studied here at Duke University with Dr. Steve Nowicki, where she researched the mechanics of sound production in lobsters. Having been a serious clarinet player in college, Dr. Patek wanted to find a way to combine her love of music with her love of science and the ocean, which this research topic gave her. After graduate school, she went on to do her postdoc studies at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California Berkeley. The institute consisted of approximately thirty postdocs from various scientific fields and visiting and local professors who were a part of the institute. This experience allowed Dr. Patek to create friendships and collaborations that have lasted throughout her career, and it made her unafraid to reach across the scientific fields. After her postdoc studies, she was hired as a professor at Berkeley. Dr. Patek is also very thankful to Dr. Beth Brainerd who became a sort of life mentor to her, rather than just a scientific mentor.

Despite being such a respected scientist, Dr. Patek says that she has had her fair share of embarrassing moments. For example, her first scientific talk was at a regional meeting that happened to be held at Harvard. Talk about pressure! Her friends were sitting in the front row at her talk, and as Dr. Patek went through her presentation she noticed that they were all laughing to each other about something. Naturally, this made Dr. Patek even more nervous than she already was. It turns out that her hair had gotten stuck and was sticking straight up for half of her talk! However, this talk helped her overcome her nerves and her presentations only improved from then on.

While she greatly enjoys teaching, Dr. Patek greatly prefers researching and having a few hours of uninterrupted time to simply think about science. In addition, she loves running a lab and getting to meet people from various perspectives and see their input on the question that they are researching. According to Dr. Patek, the most frustrating thing about her career is not having enough time since teaching is so time-consuming, as are all of her requirements to the university and other organizations. However, she also says that making a discovery is the most rewarding experience. She wishes that the field of biomechanics involved more evolutionary thinking because cross-species analysis often reveals flaws in the mechanical models that seem to be supported by one species.

Great Expectations

When I first read that I had been accepted to the Howard Hughes program for the summer, I was immediately nervous and incredibly excited to see what the summer would hold. After talking with an alumni of the program, I realized what a great opportunity I had been given to look into the lives of researchers here at Duke. Since I have never worked in a lab before this summer, I was very nervous because I had absolutely no idea what I would be doing or what I would be in charge of at the lab. However, now that I have settled in at my lab, I have calmed my nerves enough to see how beneficial this program will be.

Through this program, I hope to gain a better understanding of what life is truly like as a professional researcher. Seeing the day-to-day lives of the people that work in my lab and hearing their backstories and the years that they have dedicated to their education and the work that they are currently doing has shown me that the life of a researcher is not necessarily an easy one, but if you are passionate about your research topic it can be very rewarding. In addition, I hope to use this program to develop strong relationships with the people in my lab. After this summer, I might decide to continue working for Dr. Patek or maybe I will try to work with one of the faculty speakers that spark my interest. Either way, it never hurts to have a friendly face who is a well-regarded faculty member of the department that I am interested in studying. However, the main goal that I have for this summer is to definitively decide if research is a career path that I am seriously interested in pursuing.

On another note, the lab that I am working in this summer is Dr. Sheila Patek’s lab. We are located in the Biological Sciences building, and whenever I need a brief break from data analysis I love walking up and down the halls of the building and looking at all of the different biology or evolutionary anthropology labs that are housed within the building. Here’s a picture of the main area of the lab that I work in!

This is the Instron, a materials testing machine, which we can use to examine the mechanical properties of the exoskeletons of mantis shrimp.

This is the Instron, a materials testing machine, which we can use to examine the mechanical properties of the exoskeletons of mantis shrimp.