Honors Experiences

Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship 2024 (SURF)

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This past summer (2024), I got the awesome opportunity to do research at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center all summer! In the beginning of the summer, I got to learn how to use Spike2 to turn diaphragm EMG recordings into quantifiable data. I then had the opportunity to perform a few perfusions (for three of them I removed the brain and for one of them I removed the spinal cord). The brains harvested from perfusions were cleared using a protocol my lab had never used before, so we were glad it worked well! After clearing and imaging the brains (which is a long process), I got to look at 3D renderings of the brains. I looked at cell bodies and processes in different areas of the brain. This was done to determine if there are any connections between the forebrain and the respiratory centers in the brainstem. The program ended with a poster symposium. I had never worked in a scientific setting, so this experience was really important to me. The graduate student I worked with and a postdoc in the lab were able to give me realistic insight as to what a career in research could look like as well as the process to get there. This contributed to growing into my definition of being a global citizen scholar in that I got the opportunity to learn about the lives of graduate students, the potential careers, and scientific knowledge. I included a screenshot from the scalable brain atlas I used to reference different areas of the brain because I was using this atlas all summer long searching up specific structures and I would have been lost otherwise.