About Neha Mani
I am a student at Columbia University majoring in Biochemistry and Linguistics. My research focuses on elucidating the structures of the enzyme PORCN and its complex with cell-signaling ligand Wnt which are important for developing cancer therapeutics.
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Networking Opportunity in Science Journalism and Academia: NUCSJ
What is NUCSJ?
NUCSJ is a consortium of 20 undergraduate journals chiefly interested in STEM research at the undergraduate level. Our mission is three-fold: to create a collaborative network for undergraduate science journalism, initiate conversations about research dissemination, and positively impact future science communicators.
Every year, we host the National Undergraduate Conference on Scientific Journalism. Featuring Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times columnists, Nobel Laureates, author professors, and pioneers in research, this event brings together hundreds of student scientists to discuss research practice within the context of publication and student journalism. For 2023, this conference will be held in the fall (date TBA).
Why are we reaching out?
We are in the process of recruiting speakers for the conference. We want to diversify the voices on our panels and discussions to engage and connect with the undergraduate student body across different fields and backgrounds. In order to do this, we need your help!
If you have a professor, journalist, scientist, or science communicator (of any form!) in mind, please reach out to nm3307@columbia.edu (Neha Mani, Laidlaw 2022 from Columbia University) and sas2473@barnard.edu (Sarah Sherman)! Even if you don’t have someone particular in mind, if you have an idea for a panel or speaker, send us an email. Additionally, if you are part of an undergraduate research journal at your university and would like to incorporate your journal into our consortium, let us know!
Be on the lookout for an announcement from us regarding the conference date! We hope to see you there.
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Week Five:
I acquired a variety of skills in leading workshops and training younger students in developing research prowess and a passion for science education. My project mentor, Arya who is the Director of the Science Squad, has been instrumental in guiding me throughout the project. She has been critical in helping me effectively lead workshops, manage communication with all my students, and ensure the program is maximally productive! She has taught me a lot about leadership, particularly the ways in which leadership is not always about doing everything yourself, but rather knowing when to delegate tasks to increase the organization’s productivity. Her advice applies to leadership I’ll exhibit in my other extracurricular activities in the present and in the future.
Week Four:
What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered and how did you go about resolving them? Speak to a specific challenge you have encountered and some of the ways that you tackled the problem.
One of the challenges I've encountered is making sure students stay on course with their deadlines + submitting materials to me in a timely fashion. To ensure consistent communication with my students, I use Slack to get in touch with students quickly and send all my workshop slides/tasks via email. So far, I've been able to make sure students keep me in the loop about their progress and are on track to publishing their outreach projects on our organization website by August 25th. Another challenge I encountered was ensuring students communicate with each other during our workshops because I believe science education should be collaborative and didn't want the students to feel isolated. I have been successful in forging collaborations between students on their projects and one student will be starting an initiative in the fall which many other students in our program are interested in helping with as well! So, this has been a super exciting development and I look forward to encouraging more teamwork in our program for the rest of the summer.
Week One:
My community engagement project is a summer program offered by The Science Squad, an NGO founded in 2016 by a Laidlaw alum! My project is centered around engaging high schoolers in carrying out a research project of their own while also conducting a Science Education Outreach Project (SEOP) that allows them to be part of a grassroots movement in increasing scientific discourse in their local communities—the high schoolers part of this program come from schools and communities without robust science research programs or course offerings and therefore want to be part of a change in their community for increasing scientific literacy. Although this topic is widely discussed in science education, it seems that there hasn’t been one concrete solution, at least one that addresses the needs of students in urban and suburban educational environments. I feel that, since we all have a shared mission in increasing the reach of robust science education, it should empower us and not make us insecure that other people are considering solutions for the same dilemma.
My project last summer was a science research project (investigating the structural biology of proteins involved in Wnt signaling). I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to carry out a project like this due to my privilege of having a well-rounded scientific education both in high school and college. A recognition of that privilege drove me to understand how I can best attempt a solution for engaging high schoolers without these resources in scientific research and pedagogy.
Hi Julia! Students are conducting a variety of research -- from AI modeling of proteins to astrophysics research (though 90% of the projects are within the realm of biological sciences and about half are computationally based).
Week 1
If your project this summer differs from your project last summer, has last summer’s project influenced your project this year, and if so how? If your project is different, what tools have you developed to help you work on this project?
Last summer, I spent the majority of my time in the lab, studying the efficacy of specific therapeutics on cancers that employ the alternative lengthening of telomeres method. While this experience gave me an appreciation of the wet lab aspect of medical research, I wanted to improve my understanding of medical research as a translational process. After all, developing pharmaceuticals to treat chronic conditions is only one part of the puzzle - funding, supply, and distribution also play a major role in ensuring the sustainable management of chronic conditions. This summer, I am thus in Uganda interning at a hypertension clinic run in association with the MUST-UNC-PHEALED Collaboration. In practice, this looks like taking part in the clinic once a week, updating the patient database, and securing medication supplies. In addition, I am also cataloging the specific long-term challenges the clinic faces and using a combination of interviews and preexisting literature to identify potential solutions. A significant portion of my project still involves the data collection and organization skills I used in the lab. However, in comparison to last summer, my project involves a more significant level of collaboration with various teams, including the clinic, nonprofit, and research staff. As I don’t speak the local Lhukonzo language, this has been a bit of an exciting challenge. That being said, I am very much looking forward to seeing where my project takes me!
Hi Julia! This project sounds amazing -- I'm so excited to hear more about it. I guess it's pretty early in your project to ask this, but have you started to see any pattern in the issues faced by the clinic / clinical issues amongst the patients you've been interacting with?
Week Three:
What does a typical day look like this summer? Aside from a narrative description, upload a photo, video and/or other media submission!
My day starts with reading and responding to emails from The Science Squad mentees and mentors from the night before. I start drafting my workshop plan for each Friday usually on the Tuesday before and create a Powerpoint presentation for a one-hour workshop. After a quick stop at Tatte bakery for a cappuccino and roasted strawberry muffins, I get back to work! I finish off my presentation and either work on updating our website or have one-on-one meetings with my mentees to discuss their outreach projects and/or research projects (usually I do some prep work before these meetings since everyone has vastly different projects in different stages of development). In the evenings, I meet with Arya, the organization director, to discuss pertinent next steps for the program (we've done a mix of virtual/cafe/dinner meetings depending on our schedules—we went to a grilled cheese place near MIT which was fun!). I've attached a screenshot from one workshop presentation I presented two weeks ago here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LOJKQmioUXDv6mlAXPkd7WG5mKwSKlU2/view?usp=sharing
Week Five:
What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience? Have you met anyone who has been instrumental in shaping/helping you conduct your project? Briefly, how has this person impacted you? What have you learned about leadership from this individual, and how might it influence your actions, work, and self in the future?
On the practical side, I have learned to work with a lot of different programs in new ways (including but not limited to Polaris, a library site; Raiser's Edge, a finance site; Adobe InDesign; YouTube; Instagram; and Blackbaud, a general organization site). I have also learned a lot about how a real nonprofit functions - it requires a lot of intercommunication to make sure things don't get done twice or not done at all. I have been working a lot with the head of Events, who is not technically my boss but who has been offering me a lot of advice on getting work done (do it early in case you make mistakes and have to go back!), on working in a library (the patrons come first, as do the donors) and on life in Paris in general (don't take the train after 11pm because they don't come as frequently). I think that her advice has taught me that leadership is very site-specific, and it can't really be taught; you just have to absorb knowledge from others and be willing to pass it on. There is no such thing as "general leadership skills" except being polite, patient, and a clear speaker.
Hi Sylvi! I'm so impressed by the wealth of knowledge and skill set you've derived from your project thus far. I agree that leadership is really site-specific and there's no "one" model for it.
Week Two:
My project takes place over Zoom predominantly with hour-long in-person meetings with my mentor weekly to discuss how the program is developing and any adjustments we should make for our weekly workshops for the students. The reason for the mainly online format is to reach students from all across the east coast and connect them with undergraduate mentors who are also in different parts of the world over the summer! In our weekly workshops, in addition to learning critical skills in research practices and outreach project development, we converse about the importance of participating in scientific discourse with each other and pursuing outreach projects so that all students have the opportunity to engage in important scientific conversations with their peers, no matter what resources they have access to in their communities. In these workshops, I stress the importance of making outreach projects accessible to students without prior research knowledge as it is very easy to think of outreach projects that are, unconsciously, tailored to students with previous exposure to science research (e.g. using jargon that may be unfamiliar to students who haven’t engaged with research papers before). Because the students who have elected to be part of this program are from communities/schools which don’t have established research programs (and they were self-motivated to learn how to do research on their own), they are truly inspired to give back to their community the guidance and pedagogy that they’ve received through The Science Squad. It is this common drive that the students and I share that has made our program successful thus far!
Week 1: As you set out on your research or community engagement project, do you find yourself experiencing any worries or insecurities about saying something that’s already been said? How do we as researchers and/or volunteers learn to address or set aside those insecurities or, better yet, to use them to our advantage?
Hi! This summer, I am working with FEDETUR, the Federation of Tourism Enterprises in Chile on understanding the current state of carbon counting and emissions reduction in Chilean tourism. I have some worries about explaining certain aspects of sustainable tourism to Chilean contacts if they already know them. This week, I am getting a better sense of the carbon counting and emissions reduction / environmental impact work done within Chilean tourism enterprises already. I also realize the reemphasis on these themes could help further grow sustainable choices in Chile, so repeating a very valid issue should perhaps not be of large concern given the scope of the project.
From a more obvious perspective, I have some insecurities about the language barrier between myself and those I will work with, as I am working fully in Spanish. While I feel fluent, Spanish is not my native language, and Chilean Spanish is especially known for being quite distinctive and hard to understand for native Spanish speakers, so I do not catch 100% of what is said. I’m filling the gaps quite quickly. This barrier has also made me think about how to use my perspective especially within Chile.
Chilean universities require students to pursue internships during their college years, so doing what I’m doing is quite common in my organization. However, they have never had a foreign intern, so I am thinking about the ways I might best serve them through my perspective. This might be helping with English communications and research or providing a US perspective on the tourism sphere. I look forward to learning more.
Wow! This is so cool, Harrison. I think it's really great that you acknowledge the limitations of your linguistic ability and are actively working to make sure you're communicating as best you can with the people you're working with.