Emma, blog #3, Weeks 3 and 4

The past 2 weeks has been filled with a lot of excitement, as 2 more high school students have joined my lab, and I got my project.

The first high school student who came to my lab is named Meghan. She is from Dallas, Texas and her and I are working on the project together. The other high school student is named Matt, and he came to the lab shortly after Meghan. He is still going through training and has not been assigned a project, but I have a feeling he will be doing something in immunochemistry like I am doing.

The project I was assigned to was different then I originally thought, but I've been really enjoying it. Coming into the lab, I thought that I would be running behavioral tests, however my help was needed in an immunochemistry project.

The mice are run through behavioral tests, and then they are euthanized so that their brains can be analyzed. This is where Meghan and I come in. We get the full brains, slice them up, and then use a DAB technique to stain the brains so we can analyze them under a microscope. The DAB technique is extremely tedious, as I need to pick up extremely thin brain slices with a paint brush tip because trying to move them any other way would result in tears in the brain. The process of slicing the brains to analyzing them after staining is a process that takes a full work week. So far, I have analyzes slices from 2 different brains, and will continue to use the DAB technique to stain brains for the remainder of my time at the lab.

Although I spend most of my time doing immunochemistry, I did complete my mouse training and can handle mice alone. Yesterday my PI emailed everyone in the lab asking for volunteers to run behavioral tests for a new project, and I volunteered, Immunochemistry only takes up the morning everyday, so in the afternoon I will now be running behavioral tests with the mice. This was my initial goal when coming to the lab, so I'm extremely happy to get hands on experience with the mice.

The lab feels like a community, which has been the most surprising part of this experience for me. My lab is large, with 21 people currently working there, which makes the lab environment kind of hectic, but at the same time there are always people to talk too. I've been able to go out to dinner multiple times with people from my lab, and even got asked to go to an undergraduate's birthday celebration with her friends from UPenn.

Finally, my PI not only runs a lab, but at the same time he is a clinical doctor who has schizophrenic patients he sees every Wednesday afternoon. He asked me if I wanted to shadow him when he does his clinical rounds, and I of course said yes. Next Wednesday I will get to shadow my PI for 5 hours as he meets with 10 patients, and really see the other side of his job. I think it will be a great experience to shadow such a reknown UPenn psychiatrist and see how his lab work with schizophrenia translates over to his clinical interactions.