autumn 2012
August prior to this year, I was greeted by the following email in my inbox:
I literally jumped up and down around my room for five minutes straight I was so excited! I had been previously been rejected due to a less-than-optimal math grade, so having this validation of my continued efforts was especially poignant since I was quite scared about not making it into the department. This acceptance would change the course of my education, steering me away from a direct-to-med-school track and aiming me toward the lucrative world of technology. Despite this, I still found time to incorporate medicine and culture into my education. In Clarence Spigner's class centered around The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I summed the quarter of interdisciplinary discussion into this final paper. I was a little put off by the fact that the essay got points docked because the instructor disagreed/misinterpreted my point about Henrietta being (mostly) a victim of fate.
winter 2013
After attending a computational neuroscience seminar autumn quarter, I became entranced by the concept of combining my new computer science major with neurobiology. Professor Bill Moody's class was intensely fascinating and also quite challenging. Labs were the most interesting labs I had every engaged in: we dissected leeches and crayfish in order to impale live neurons with miniscule microelectrodes that had to be controlled on the micro scale and record real action potentials. For our final project, my partner Tess Donckels and I worked to simulate a neuron that spontaneously fired bursts of action potentials that we had found in the leech in the crayfish neuromuscular junction.
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Spring 2013
I furthered my immersion into the intersection between computer science and neurobiology by continuing my work in the lab of Rajesh P. N. Rao, working on using electroencephalography to measure motor imagery in the motor cortex. This culminated in the summer pilot study shown here (I'm the cameraman that says "yes!"), in which Raj, under the EEG cap, successfully sent the correct signal to Dr. Andrea Stocco, under the trans-magnetic stimulator on the other end.