August 10, 2021 | One last selfie with the hospital at the forefront of the nation’s healthcare   My last week at Mayo Clinic with my lovely co-interns, supervisors, and PI Dr. St Louis went by breathtakingly quickly. By the end, I felt like there wasn’t enough time to complete all I had set out to do with our […]

August 4, 2021 | Olivia, Dr. St Louis, and I at this week’s Journal Club   Week 8 was devoted to quite a bit of shadowing and actually getting to write the COVI-SWA study methods, introduction, and results in sections. In journal club, we discussed a publication that delved into the neurological mechanisms underlying the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. In […]

July 27, 2021 | Olivia, Emma, and I finalizing COVI-SWA files together   Week 8 was focused on making our final changes to the scoring of all COVI-SWA files to ensure that the data analysis that we will be running next week is as accurate as possible to standardized methods of scoring. To do this, we reviewed chin tone […]

July 21, 2021 | The initial intern COVI-SWA scoring came to an end this week, albeit with some technical errors to be fixed in several studies next week. Some of these technical errors involved impedance such as faulty electrode placement, bleed from other leads, or unknown rhythmic non-biologic signal usually around 60 Hz. Deciding how to exclude these artifacts […]

July 14, 2021 | Coming off a four-day weekend this week, we continued to set up the preliminary files for the COVID-19 positive and control patient PSGs: the EDFs, text files, arousal text files, and scoring files. With some of the scoring files already uploaded, we could finally begin to score these files for muscle activity, calculate statistics of […]

July 8, 2021 | At the outset of week 5, we continued scoring the challenging NAPS or North American Prodromal Synucleinopathy Consortium files from McGill University sleep studies. Now that I have passed the Gold Standard, I can score these official, de-identified sleep studies from which data will be published in future RBD NAPS Consortium studies. I began drafting […]

July 8, 2021 | Scoring de-identified practice PSGs to prep for the Gold Standard   Week four at Mayo Clinic started off with us interns completing the remaining training file polysomnograms or PSGs and one extra Multiple System Atrophy or MSA patient training file. Our scoring master Tyler and our PI doctor St Louis reviewed these files and told […]

June 23, 2021 | From right to left: David, Kevin, Scoring Master Tyler (virtual), Olivia, and me working on scoring training file 5   We began digging deep into the scoring curriculum training files this week. As it turns out, scoring is an even more complex art form than I had previously guessed. Even with this complexity, we ended […]

June 15, 2021 | Dale Chihuly’s glass chandelier in the Gonda building lobby This week brought many new experiences and the beginnings of great relationships with my fellow interns. By the end, most of us were fully in-person and scoring the polysomnograms, or PSGs, that we had been learning about from day one of last week. Beginning with a […]

June 8, 2021 | Our first-day introductions. From top left to bottom right: supervisor Paul Timm, me, David, Olivia, Kevin, Chloe, Jacob. June 1st, 2021 My name is Gwen and I’m from Saint Paul, Minnesota.  I’m a rising junior at Cornell College double majoring in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Spanish.  I’m pre-med with the goal of conducting representative […]