The brain is an amazing enigma. We as humans use the brain to do everything, but we are unaware of how it controls much of the body. This summer, I am working in Dr. Tadross’ lab, which studies the connection between the activity of specific cell types of the brain and various behaviors. Through working in this lab, I have the great opportunity to work with two mentors, one specializing in biomedical engineering and one specializing in neurobiology. Through this, I envision myself learning more about how to build tools that detect the activity of specific cell types and use these tools in order to make discoveries about the functions of these cell types.
This past week, I was faced with a lot of different trainings focusing on topics from general lab safety and chemical safety to animal handling. My mentor focusing in neurobiology, Sasha, is working with mice to see how dopamine affects movement and learning, so I needed to learn how to properly handle these mice in order to use them in experiments. On my first day, she led me to a room full of mice in cages. Throughout the day, she would carry them out of the cages, at times perching them on her arm, and she told me that I would be doing the same sometime soon. I’ve never worked with animals. In fact, I’ve never even had a pet, so I have no experience actually taking care of animals. I expect to become a lot more comfortable with working with animals and hopefully become less scared to hold them. My other mentor, Zack, is creating a product that can measure the electrical activity of cells in the brain, and in order to build and test this product, I will need to learn how to use equipment in a cleanroom. As a part of my training, I watched a video detailing how to put on a cleanroom suit. The suit looks somewhat like the suits you see in movies when people are handling radioactive materials. I will not lie, I am very intimidated, but I anticipate eventually mastering the use of the equipment and gaining more experience with actually building a medical device (which I really haven’t done much in my classes, I will add).
Overall, I expect to learn a lot about the brain and the functions of different parts of the brain. I’ve known that I have been interested in the brain for about a year now, but I had never taken an actual class focusing solely on neuroscience, so I believe that this hands-on experience will help me further look into my interests. In addition, I anticipate developing a great relationship with Dr. Tadross and my bench mentors Sasha and Zack. They all seem to be very kind so far, and they show that they believe that there is no such thing as a dumb question and greatly encourage me to ask questions and research what I am not familiar with. I hope that I can adopt this mindset and use this mindset to become a better scientist by becoming more comfortable with exploring and investigating new topics and new research questions. Furthermore, I anticipate making some mistakes. I am sure that I will not do everything perfectly the first time, and it may take a few attempts to effectively understand what I need to do. I am prepared for this, and I hope that this experience will further help me understand that success does not equal perfection.
Also, to be completely honest, I hope this summer can help me figure out what biomedical engineering (and engineering in general) is, as I just declared it as a major and I still don’t really know.