Week 1:
University of Chicago Medical Center

June 21, 2013

So I’ve completely settled into Chicago! Monday I moved in, met Dr. Kraig, and met the other students in my program. Almost everyone in my program plans on applying for medical school or medical and PhD programs.

The building with the pink windows is my dorm and the statue marks where the first isolation of plutonium occurred and where the world’s first nuclear reactor was made. It was made on a squash court under the old college football field.
Tuesday was orientation day and the students in the Pritzker School of Medicine Education in Research (PSOMER) program got to get to know each other better, tour the undergraduate campus and tour the medical school campus. We also were given our first white coats!

Wednesday is when the real fun began! I got to see the lab and meet everyone who works there. Dr. Kraig is a Cornell College alumni! He has his MD in Neurology and his PhD in Physiology and Biophysics. He focuses on neurological disease and on how environmental enrichment (increased social, physical, and intellectual activity) can lead to an increased resistance in the brain to neurological diseases. He is the principle investigator at the lab I’m working in this summer. Kae Pusic is a postdoctoral scholar who uses her knowledge of vaccine development and delivery to work on developing immune based-therapies for brain injuries and migraines. Aya Pusic is working on her PhD in Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. Aya focuses on how T-cells immune signaling can cause spreading depression and she also focuses on the relationship between increased environmental enrichment and decreased vulnerability for spreading depression. Yelena Grinberg is also working towards her PhD in Neurobiology. She focuses her research on peripheral signaling factors part in cognitive decline due to aging and disease. Here’s the link to the lab’s website, they research some pretty interesting topics http://kraiglab.uchicago.edu/ !

I became more informed as to what my project would be this summer and I am super excited about it! We believe that environmental enrichment leads to an increase in myelination, which leads to an increase in cognition. Thus an aged brain can become young again by enrichment!- Our lab is defining the naturally occurring processes responsible. I even got to help measure the integrated optical density of pixels of images of gray matter! Of course school is never over so I’ve been reading up on exosomes, gray matter, white matter, environmental enrichment, multiple sclerosis, and neurobiology in general! We even came up with a working title for the paper we are planning to write based on the research this summer: “Environmental Enrichment-Induced Exosomal MicroRNAs Involved in Oxidant Defense and Therefore, Myelination of Aging Brain.”

One place I still need to visit is the undergraduate library! It has a dome for reading in!!!

I got to do more hands-on work Thursday, I sliced the cortex of rats brains and mounted the slices to microscope slides for myelin staining we will do next week. It was so neat to see the different parts of the brain!

I also helped measure the integrated optical density of white matter in environmentally enriched brains vs. non-environmentally enriched brains.

My experience as a lab assistant at Cornell came in handy Friday when I made RPMI media for the dendritic cell cultures.

Later in the day I got to go to see Yelena use confocal microscopy for her research project.

I learned that the green are astrocytes, the red are nuclear factor kappa-B (which are cytosolic transcription factors that be be ‘activated’ to move to the nucleus of cells), and the blue are DAPI (labeling DNA, thus the nuclei of all cells in the brain tissue slice).

I’ve been planning on attending medical school for quite awhile now, but I think this fellowship might sway me to apply for MD/PhD programs so I can conduct my own research as well as see patients.

Well that’s all for this week!!!