Research Poster!

Our internship has officially come to a close!

For my poster, I will be summarizing one of the experiments that we helped with in the air quality lab that involves the compounds that are emitted from crumb rubber, which is commonly used in turfs and playgrounds.

My poster will highlight two different brands of crumb rubber: Al's and TJB, and the different compounds that came off of each of them/which they share, and what kind of health effects these compounds are known to have on humans!

Some of the compounds that we found were very surprising--there were carcinogens and other really harmful compounds that could mess with your internal organs and skin. Even though the compounds are in very small doses and aren't really anything to worry about on their own, it's important to consider what other things emit those same compounds every day and how much exposure we get to them daily.

We already have data collected, and I've been editing the paragraphs for the different sections that I plan to include on the poster!

Overall, I will definitely miss working in the lab and talking to the people there (we won't be cutting new black wires anymore :( ) and I am so glad that I had the opportunity to participate!

Research Poster Update!

Summer is almost over! Unfortunately, that means my time at the lab is coming to a close.

I'm excited, however, to showcase my work via my research poster.

The main challenge my poster faces is how to distill the enormous amount of information I have into a manageable presentation.

I'm considering my audience, including lots of visuals, and thinking strategically about format.

My plan right now is to focus mainly on the part of the project I've been working the most on- the in vivo experiments with mice. I'll include a brief, pared down introduction to the overarching research, then describe the mouse experiments in more detail. I'll talk about my procedures and methods, the goal of the experiments, and the kind of data we are collecting. My mentor has some great figures that illustrate exciting data, and I've been taking pictures of my mice to add even more images.

I can't wait to share my work with you all!

Lab Update

Hello Everyone! We haven't done a post in a while, so I just wanted to give a quick update on how my internship has been going.

I've recently been moving into a lot of independent work, which is very exciting! One of my personal goals this summer was to oversee a mouse experiment from start to finish, and I had the chance to do that. For one week, I administered injections to a group of mice. At the end of the week, I sacked the mice, collected their blood, dissected them, and collected liver samples. Then, I ran the blood samples for cell count and ran the liver samples through qPCR to quantify protein expression. I have now started another full experiment with a very different procedure, so I'm looking forward to seeing that one through to the end as well. One goal down!

In general, I'm still learning even more techniques that will help me work with the mice. So far, everything has been running really smoothly and I'm loving the work. I have also begun assembling my research poster. It's been a challenge to distill the tons of information I have into a readable amount, but I'm figuring it out.

That's all for now, can't wait to see what you all have been up to!

Mel DeBlasio