Lin Abigail Tan 

This semester, I was excited to return back to my pulmonary biology lab at Cincinnati Children’s after a year-long hiatus. I had learned a lot from my UC Health neuroscience lab (e.g. cell culture and dissection), but I was glad to see my mentor Samriddhi again, as well as other members of the lab.

 

I finished my animal training (nearly a year after I started due to the pandemic), but I was glad to actually be able to handle the mice during the large harvest in March. The importance of ethics in animal husbandry was paramount during this work. Afterwards, I followed the process of fixing the tissues (lots of arithmetic required when diluting reagents, actually), embedding them in paraffin wax, and imaging them on the widefield microscope. I also shadowed my mentor in the confocal core with the laser microscope (a really cool, really expensive piece of equipment — also can be really dangerous if not used properly).

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See below for some microscope images I took, as well as an art piece I drew that I felt exemplified the wonder of scientific curiosity. Science and art are not necessarily mutually exclusive! 

 

During my time in the lab this semester, I also had some insightful conversations with several graduate students in the lab. It was interesting to hear about other career pathways in the biomedical sciences; for example, one of them wants to teach high school after obtaining his PhD, and another wants to work as a scientific liaison, of sorts, for a pharmaceutical company. We also talked about other non-scientific things, like renting apartments and other aspects of "adulting."

 

I was glad the skills from UC Health were able to be translated back here, and I’m excited to continue working at CCHMC throughout this summer!