Week 9: Research Retreat and Drafting out Poster

Hi everyone! This week is a bit different because we had a research retreat on Monday. This retreat consisted of presentations from scientists in my department and talks by guest speakers Dr. Rosenthal and Dr. Tward. The presentations from scientists in my department made me realize how wide the field of ENT spans. There were the more expected presentations regarding hearing loss but also some unexpected ones. One of the coolest presentations was one where the scientist showed an augmented reality software for doing ear surgery. The demonstration videos for it seemed super promising and the mapping of the ear and the surrounding bones seemed very realistic and accurate. A very unexpected presentation was about cancer. It wasn’t specific about ENT related cancers but about using neutrophils to prevent the metastasis of cancer in general. There wasn’t a super direct application to ENT specifically but the new strides made by combining immunology, molecular biology, and otolaryngology were super interesting. 

The guest speakers were also amazing and inspiring to listen to. Dr. Rosenthal spoke about how success can look like failure and went through his entire journey in becoming a surgeon-scientist. He was really funny and explained many scientific topics super clearly. His encouragement and excitement surrounding becoming an MD/PHD has inspired me to consider it a bit more. Dr. Tward was similarly inspiring. His path towards his current position as a surgeon-scientist and involvement in creating biotechnology companies showed me to try to take advantage of opportunities that come by. 

After the research retreat on Monday, my mentor and I focused on figuring out how to measure intensity in my FSCN2 analysis. Just by eye, we noticed that FSNC2 became brighter as cells got bigger and wanted to measure this quantitatively. We tried a bunch of different parameters within Imaris but eventually figured that Imaris may not be able to measure what we wanted it to. We then switched to using ImageJ/Fiji which I was already familiar with and worked very well for getting intensity values quickly. I’m still working out some of the parameters we should follow for FSCN2 intensity analysis but I’m getting there and this method is far better than using Imaris. 

During this week I also worked on drafting up my introduction and methods. My introduction was modified based on all the previous work and literature review I had done both for my project specifically and the requirements of the senior project like the proposal and abstract. My methods were written based on previous literature and the specific parameters that my lab uses. 

See you next week with a more finalized poster and results!