What are you most excited about as you start your Laidlaw research summer?
As I begin my Laidlaw research, I am most excited by the fact that this project is genuinely my own. I have been working in Dr. Carol Troy's lab at Columbia Medical Center for the better part of six months, but until now my contributions have been embedded within the work of two PhD students, executing pieces of their projects rather than driving a question of my own. For my Laidlaw summer, I have been able to design a project that bridges aspects of both of the research projects I have worked on into a question I truly find compelling: whether retinal vein occlusion produces trans-synaptic neurodegeneration in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus, and which neurological markers most sensitively capture that downstream effect. Having spent the prior months learning lab techniques alongside more senior researchers, I now feel prepared to take ownership of a question end-to-end and the prospect of doing that work with the support of mentors who already know my strengths and gaps is what I find most exciting heading into the summer.
This week, the discussions we held about research cut across the disciplines. How does the interdisciplinary nature of this program, the fact that students are focusing on such a diverse range of projects, help you think about your project and/or your academic interests more broadly?
The interdisciplinary nature of this cohort has been one of the most interesting parts of the week so far. My own project sits firmly within the neurosciences, and it has been easy in my prior lab experience to absorb a fairly narrow picture of what research methodology actually looks like: mouse work, perfusions, cryosections, staining, image quantification. Hearing my peers describe projects that examine arms access and public health questions investigated through interviews and policy frameworks rather than wet-bench techniques has expanded my understanding of what constitutes research and inquiry in a way that I think will improve how I approach my own work. For example, I have found myself looking for more methodologies to conduct the experiments I am doing using JoVE and other databases highlighted by our librarians, and although this is not inherently interdisciplinary, the different ways that my peers are conducting their research has made me think about the different ways I can conduct mine. Further, interacting with people researching topics so different from mine has pushed me to articulate the significance of my project in terms that do not depend on a listener already understanding neuroscience jargon, and to be more deliberate about why the question matters beyond the immediate technical context in which it sits.
As you begin your individual research projects this week, do you anticipate any challenges in getting started? If so, what are they?
I do not anticipate substantial challenges in the initial phase, given that I am continuing within a lab I already know well and have a scoped project, with banked tissue and validated antibodies already available from prior cohorts in the Troy Lab. The challenges I am most attentive to are practical ones tied to the volume of bench work ahead. Several of the techniques central to my project, including immunohistochemistry on dLGN sections and retinal flat-mount dissection for RBPMS-stained RGC quantification, are procedures I have observed but not yet performed independently. To address this, I have been reading through the relevant literature and JoVE protocols to write up my own procedures, which I plan to refine in conversation with my PI and PhD students before applying them to experimental tissue. An additional consideration is I have been asked to teach certain techniques I am more familiar with (and will be performing for my project) to an incoming summer student, which I am looking forward to—I expect that having to articulate not only how a method is performed but why it is the appropriate choice for a given question will strengthen my own conceptual grasp of the work. The corresponding challenge is simply one of time management, as balancing my own experimental timeline against teaching responsibilities will require more deliberate scheduling.
This week you moved into a new dorm room and met new friends, mentors, and research collaborators. Take a photograph of something (or someone) new and post!
I am really excited to continue trying more good eats in the city over the next few weeks (these were fruit flavored sweet buns from a restaurant called Tao)!!