Hi everyone, I’m Kiera! I was lucky enough to be placed with Ting Wu Genetics Lab at Harvard Medical School for my internship this summer. It has been an amazing first week, if I do say so myself. I am working under the mentorship of Fei Zhao and Laura Briemann, two post-doctoral fellows in the lab. Since stepping into the lab, I have felt nothing but welcome and accepted by each and every member, despite being at such a different place in my life and education. The first day was spent making introductions and meeting all the lab members, including Ting, who is one of the most amazing and impressive people I’ve ever met, as well as completing some basic lab safety training. The next day, we jumped right into a morning lab meeting where Fei gave a presentation about a paper on a new drift correction method! I obtained my ID, and Laura and Fei guided us through some basic microscopy skills. We then captured some of our own images for analysis later in the week. Then on Wednesday, we visited our lab’s little garden, the library on campus, and we got to practice some pipetting skills, a staple skill in any lab.
On Thursday, we started our day with some videos and discussions about some different genetic and biological processes, and some more insight into microscopy. Later that day, we took a trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History!
It was a truly amazing trip, and there were so many interesting exhibits that sparked some great conversation. One of my favorite exhibits was the glass flowers: hyperrealistic depictions of different plants and flowers from the late 19th century. I also really enjoyed seeing the geology exhibit, as well as visiting the connected Peabody Museum! Then on Friday, we had a lesson on Bioimage Analysis, and learned how to utilize a whole new program to get the most from our images. Which we then used to do our analysis of our images until it was time to go home on Friday. It is so incredibly amazing to be learning from such incredible, intelligent, and impressive people, truly the best in their fields and trailblazers of science; it is so surreal to be surrounded by such stimulating conversation and I cannot wait to see what the rest of my time here holds, I’ve learned so much already! Thank you all for following along!
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