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Currently, I work in the UMD Neurotheory lab under Dr. Dan Butts. Our lab is currently focused on visual neurons which correspond to retinal foveal cells.
Our eyes are moving around constantly, even we think we are focused on a point. This, coupled with the fact that foveal receptors see only about 0.008 degrees of the whole visual field, makes connecting visual stimuli to neural responses very difficult without incredibly precise eye tracking. Any tiny movement of the eye will cause recptors to see different parts of the visual field, changing the downstream neural responses. And if you can't correct for this, you can't make an accurate model. Luckily, a lab we collaborate with has developed just this kind of precise eye tracking, and it is my responsibility to make sense of the data, and build the models to be published.
This includes building a data pipeline to process the raw data, creating visualizations to understand the data, filtering bad trials automatically and manually, finding receptive fields, building linear and quadratic models, and then plugging as much data as we can get into large convolutional networks. Then, I analyze how the models perform under different parameters, and optimizing. It's a lot of fun, and endlessly interesting.
For the past two years, I worked in the UMD Herberholz lab under Dr. Jens Herberholz. That lab is multifaceted, having projects with the genetics, microbiota, and neurobiology of crayfish. But my work there was in chronic intermittent ethanol exposure, or CIEE.
Why crayfish? Crayfish are a unique model organism for two reasons. First, they have much larger neurons than mammals, making techniques like dissectiona and electrophysiology easier and more replicatable. Second, they produce unique and stereotyped behaviors in response to alcohol, which can be quantified, analyzed, and compared to neural responses. This makes them a great model organism for studying the neural basis of how alcohol affects neurons, and could be important to understanding and treating disorders like alcohol abuse.
My experiments involved exposing crayfish to ethanol baths once a day for weeks, and then measuring their behavior and hemolymph. I was interested in whether they they show sensitization or habituation to ethanol over time. The results were not statistically significant, but I did find some interesting trends that could be explored in the future. The response was non-linear, and requires more data.
In 2021, before College, I worked under Dr. Victoria Coles at Horn Point Laboratory, on a currently ongoing project to create cheap, mass producible, small scale GPS drifter instruments to study ocean currents.
They are mainly designed for small to medium scale areas like the Chesapeake Bay, and could illuminate the behaviors of currents which are heavily affected by complex topographical features and tides. They are also designed to be customizable to study salinity and temperature. My work on them was to improve the accuracy of the RF signal, and add several new features; like current location tracking and a low power mode. I also worked on the data science side, making a pipeline to dump data, clean it, and visualize it in conjunction with satellite imagery.
In 2022, I worked under Dr. Jessica O'hara, in a two semester research course, studying bacteriophage genetics.
I worked in a group setting, studying how knocking out specific E. coli genes made them more or less vulnerable to several strains of bacteriophage. The experiments were heavily structured, but taught me important lab skills, and introduced me to experiment design and microbiology. Our results showed minor changes to e. coli growth rate when the FumA and FumC genes were knocked out. These genes are involved in the TCA cycle, and could affect the energy available to the cell to defend against phage infection.Broadly, the lab's mission is to learn more about bacteriophage, because of their potential to fight infection. In today's world, antibiotic resistance is a growing problem, and bacteriophage could be a solution. The research is still new, because bacteriophage are very specific to the bacteria they infect. But it is a growing field, and bacterophage therapy has already saved lives. Studying them was a really enlightening experience.