I apologize ahead of time for the length of this post, but a lot happened today. For my final day shadowing Dr. Rob, I spent the first half of it not anywhere remotely near Dr. Rob himself. As soon as I arrived, he handed me my labcoat and a tray of antibodies that needed to be concentrated, and sent me to the quality control lab downstairs to a man named Brent (or Mr. Brent if I wanted to be formal). His specialty lie in the rows upon rows of machines that I mentioned earlier when I first Dr. Rob took me on the tour Monday.
Brent showed me how to operate the larger centrifuge, and showed me how to properly set up the container used to filter out the unnecessary parts of the antibody liquid, which took relatively little learning before I got the hang of it.
Now, centrifuging is a bit of a time intensive process, with about half an hour in between each cycle for this (the samples probably required about eight cycles, which I unfortunately didn’t have time to complete). In the mean time, I talked with Brent about his career, what sort of research he’s done up to now, and the current projects that he’s working on. He told me about his time at Emory University, where his close friend was one of very few people who was offered an internship at the CDC in Atlanta- the center where they handle the most dangerous diseases. Apparently, when he stepped into the extensive cleaning procedure researchers are required to go through at the end of the day, failing to realize that they also cleaned inside of the “spacesuits” themselves, he immediately panicked, thinking he had been contaminated with the Ebola he had been working with all day. Additionally, Brent had been allowed to use his blood cultures to show how Ebola grows and spreads, and it turns out that the virus liked him and his blood… quite a bit.
His research now is more categorical. Most labs, like those at NCCU, have significant amount of stored compounds. Unfortunately, people often forget to fully label them or sort them at all, leading to thousands of compounds that people don’t really know the makeup of. This is where Brent’s work comes in. He uses liquid chromatography and spectroscopy in order to determine the chemical makeup of each sample. The data evaluation takes a lot of time, and is very different from his previous work mostly on cancer cells, but he enjoys it nonetheless.
Finally, after leaving Dr. Rob’s lab, I’ve come away with a few new pieces of knowledge about a lab environment. The machines are rather loud, and you’d be surprised at how much safety protocol the more experienced researchers ignore. But, on the more serious side, I’ve learned to do all sorts of things, and observe all sorts of things, that I could never see in high school. I’ve been allowed to see and experience a professional lab environment that does research with real life impacts. In addition, I’ve also come away with a summer internship. I look forward to returning to Dr. Rob’s in the months to come.