Week 10: All Coming Together

Welcome back to my blog! This week has really been crunch week involving a lot of writing my research paper and designing my presentation. I am actually presenting earlier due to scheduling issues so everything is all due for me a bit sooner than anticipated.

Some good news for this week is I found someone I am going to interview for my project in regards to talking about Alzheimer’s. My interviewee was an undergrad student at MIT for biology and currently pursuing a PhD at Harvard. At Harvard she has worked in a neuro-aging lab where they study the brain as humans get older. This is a great parallel for my project because of Alzheimer’s and I am looking forward to learning more from her. She has a lot of research experience to speak about and can definitely improve my project.

For a lot of the week I spent time writing my research paper so I figured I could provide insight on my experience. While writing I was thankful that I created an outline before hand as it made the actual writing a lot easier. My outline consisted of an introduction, literature review, hypothesis, methodology, etc. They were just sections that help guide the reader and myself to show what my project is all about.

I spent a lot of time writing about neurofibrillary tangles and wanted to provide a sneak peak and share what I wrote about that. These tangles are abnormal accumulations of protein. The proteins are called tau proteins and collect inside neurons. Tau proteins are typically used to stabilize the neuron, however, during Alzheimer’s they get tangled and damage the neurons ability to function.

Next week I have the rehearsal for my presentation so I am looking forward to that. See you next week in my blog!