Today was definitely a slower day; we did clinic all day which means no procedures, just patients. Unfortunately, there weren’t many interesting cases that came in which I guess is a good thing. The most interesting case was one involving a kindergarten teacher who thought she just sprained her ankle. Little did she know, she broke both her tibia and fibula in three places. She was also retiring next week, so she had some concerns regarding pay roll and whatnot. Dr. Logel quite explicitly stated that she will not be going back to work considering she is now having surgery tomorrow at 7:30AM. Anyways, I know today was a little slower, but I look forward to tomorrow which is full of surgeries and no clinic.
I apologize; I couldn’t take many interesting pictures today, so here’s a picture of Dr. Logel’s work desk.
Today was a really cool day. We got to shadow a programmer working on Unreal Engine (similar to Unity which we use) and the coding that goes into making a game. They have this collaborative program so that everytime someone makes a change in the code, they upload it to the server and then another programmer checks it over before it is implemented into the code. This helps the collaboration between programmers and also prevent mistakes like the problem that happened to Kurt. We also got to learn some helpful information to help us code, like setting breakpoints to easily find a problem or researching online for the code to save time. As you can see above, he has the equivalent of five screens (one giant monitor split into 4 windows and one normal sized monitor) to aid with the programming process. We also got to work on our own projects in game design today. Right now I’m creating a 3-d 2 player tanks game where you try and shoot the other player before they kill you first. It’s a step up from the roll a ball program but I can do it. Today was really fun and I can’t wait to see some cool character design tomorrow.
Have you ever locked yourself in a freezer? Neither have I, but I imagine that it’s something like spending thirty seconds in the lab’s cold room. The microbiologists and chemists of the Lefkowitz lab need the cold room at temperatures near freezing to impede natural processes and preserve the trillions of proteins that line their metallic walls. Dr. Masoudi had to leave for a bit, so I spent the early morning reading up on G-Protein Coupled Receptors and helping Dr. Li Yin, Dr. Masoudi’s co-researcher. Dr. Li Yin was kind enough to let me do a majority of the hands-on work for her protein identification process, but this included heading into the cold room to occasionally refill the plastic column she uses for chromatography with a wash solution (it’s freezing in there). This form of chromatography works by employing an antibody that has a high affinity for the receptor that we want to extract. Everything else in the solution passes through the column without strongly interacting with the antibody in the resin. Eventually, Dr. Li Yin will pass a molecule through the same column that has an even stronger affinity for the antibody than our receptor, removing the receptor from the column. We also spent time grinding the cell membranes of moths – not something I thought I’d write in my lifetime. These moth cell-membranes hold the GPCR that we want, but in order to prepare them for filtration we need to homogenize the cell solutions and eventually mix them with some detergent. These soap molecules will act as a shield for the receptor, sustaining the structures for crystallization.
I also had the opportunity to make some stock solutions and use high-tech pipettes to deliver them into tiny aliquot containers. The LB media that I made is a combination of benzonase, a highly reactive enzyme, and protease inhibitor that prevents the denaturation of helpful cellular proteins. We soon moved on to her Western blots that showed the presence of a receptor using a set of primary and secondary enzymes. The secondary enzyme that was involved actually derives from rabbits! Another one of the enzymes she used was horseradish peroxidase that, yep, comes from horseradish.
A majority of the day was used gathering information to understand these receptors on a broader scale. Dr. Masoudi and I went over the sequence that some of these receptors undergo, from the moment an agonist – adrenaline, morphine, a photon – binds, to the recycling of these receptors in the lysosomes of cells. There’s quite a bit of literature on GPCRs, but barely any information on the mapping of these macro-molecules with X-Ray crystallography, and even less info on our synthetic protein Nb6B9 (FUN FACT: Nb6B9 was originally made from the antibodies of llamas).
A llama
Finally, Dr. Masoudi prepared our bacterial colony by taking a set of cells that (hopefully) incorporated the Nb6B9 gene into their DNA. We’ll know for sure that the gene was successfully incorporated after the DNA is sequenced by a lab at Duke, but for now we’re hoping that the colony we’ve set up will grow to produce as much Nb6B9 as possible. To avoid any fungal infections, Dr. Masoudi uses a lamp to ward off aerial imposters, but he also uses ethanol to clean the table. We really only realized how precarious the situation was after we had finished setting everything up.
Excited! (In a car)
Our electrophoresis sieve, displaying the presence of proteins based on their molar mass
Another sieve that specifically depicted the presence of a heavy contaminant that may have competed with our target protein
A set of ice-covered capsules that hold a variety of cells, proteins, and solutions
Organizing aliquots in front of a freezer
Grinding insect cell-membranes to make a homogeneous solution
A representation of a GPCR I drew
A representation of Beta Arrestin – a transducer- allowing for the recycling of a GPCR by internalization
I am still exploring, during the day today I discovered a new aspect of the building. The opportunity presented itself for me to see the media room within the editing suite. While a show was being recorded Mrs. Holt-Noel and I watched from the media room. This where I learned who typically sits in the room during the shoot. There will be a graphic designer that is in charge of adding name labels and other graphics at the bottom of the screen. Next, an associate producer is connected to the host, and assists in gearing the conversation and flow of the show. Next to them is the time keeper, and the essentially do as their title says. Lastly, there will be an expert that knows about the topic. This gave me a look at many different jobs in the world of communications.
Today was Torture Tuesday at the radio station. This is one of the segments they do on the morning show with Jared, Katie, and Jason aka the hosts of the show. They basically torture the intern Hugs which is what they call him. He is supposed to do whatever it is they tell him to do for this segment. Today, Hugs had to jump into a pile of mousetraps on a trampoline. Now to me, this sounds stupidly painful but the reason they do it is for ratings and viewers. So I went with Hugs and Reggie, the guy who filmed it professionally to a house with a trampoline and we set up the mousetraps. Setting up the mousetraps was really scary because I didn’t want to hurt myself. So after they were all set up Hugs called into the radio station and said that he was ready to do it, and through the whole thing (jumping into the traps, etc) he was on the phone on the radio. I got to Facebook live to whole thing and now there is a video up on Facebook of him jumping into the mousetraps on a trampoline. When he started jumping, unfortunately a lot of the traps shut so it wasn’t as exciting or dangerous as it probably could have been. When he did jump into the pile, there was lots of screaming, but I don’t think a lot of it was real. It seemed to be a bit exaggerated. Like I said I was in charge of the Facebook live video and there were around 500 people watching at its highest view count. While live, people are allowed to comment and in the moment I saw lots of comments by people. Lots of people saying “do it already” and others saying “poor Hugs why?” And then there were also some mean ones but I’d rather not repeat those. After it was over I went back to the station and listened to the rest of the morning show. Overall, It was a very interesting experience and it did give me a nice idea of what other traveling segments on the show would be like.
After having our initial CTI Video pitch meeting with members of the CTID team, Hope, Maddie, Caroline, and I eagerly began moving forward with the project. In short, we were tasked with coming up with a creative way to display FHI 360’s efforts, based off of Dr. Dorflinger’s speech “I’ve got you under my skin” and a Georgia Tech video regarding microneedle patches. We decided to create a stop motion whiteboard design, and spent a substantial amount of last week ideating: thinking of potential graphics that pertained to Dr. Dorflinger’s script (that we typed up word-for-word from the video).
One particular aspect that stuck with the team was when she talked about her partners/collaborators; to illustrate this, we would draw a world map and then people (or the “team”) in the areas in which FHI 360 has a big influence. While Hope and Caroline were at a meeting, Maddie and I decided to jumpstart this particular part of the project. Maddie drew the world on a whiteboard, with me drawing the parts that were unreasonably high up, and we proceeded to video, utilizing the app hyperlapse. It was super fun, and we are really enjoying this project, for it appears they would like to incorporate our ideas and possibly even illustrations into the actual video!
Another part of the video we are continuing to work on is the big finale. An actual match would be lit, and then a real IUD (that looks like a firework) would move away from it, transitioning to multiple drawings that fanned out. After this happens, someone would snap their fingers and all of this would be erased. Then, the FHI 360 logo would be hand-drawn (and sped up), and finally rotate 360 degrees. All in all, I am really enjoying my time at FHI 360, and am sad its beginning to come to an end.
Over the past few days I’ve done market research on three different projects, but the third one, which I began today, brought a new factor into perspective: safety regulations. My research began with looking to see if there were any other products being sold like the one Forthright was thinking about creating. I found one almost immediately, but there was a problem. It wasn’t UL listed. UL stands for Underwriters Laboratories, a safety certification company. They make standard safety regulations that products need to abide by to be sold in large quantities in the US. The product I had found was sold by a company based in China and didn’t have the certification needed for what it does. As Bryan explained to me, it could be bought by individual consumers for personal use, but, for example, Forthright would not be able to buy many of them and incorporate it into the production of one of their own products. What followed was a lot of searching through safety standards and trying to figure out why I couldn’t find what I wanted with the correct safety listing. The safety aspect introduced a whole new piece to the puzzle that is learning about a new product area, and it’s one that’s filled with hundreds of pages of information to understand, showing just how involved the task of developing a new product can be.
Today was a full day of meetings for the four of us – when we weren’t working on our video, we had four different meetings with CTI and FHI 360 staff. All of the people we talked with focused on their career paths, and how their routes to FHI 360 were circuitous and unexpected. I thought it was cool that two of the people we talked to, Greg Kopf and Laneta Dorflinger, both talked about how a professor in college or grad school left such a lasting impact on them that they ended up in a field of study entirely different from what they were expecting, all because that professor was able to help them realize their passions. Even Hannah, an intern from UNC who started a few days ago, told us how she’d started out at Johns Hopkins studying chemistry, but after taking classes in UNC’s Public Health program with a really great professor she realized she wanted to study that instead and completely changed her future career plans. Their stories made me more optimistic about my future, because I don’t have any idea what I want to major in right now – but that’s okay, because I have yet to meet the professor or experience the life-altering event that inspires me.
Today was probably my favorite day at French West Vaughn so far, because we got to personally create some content that is actually going to be used by a client. Last week we had been tasked with coming up with a few ideas of how Wilmington Beach could celebrate getting 100 thousand likes on their Facebook page, and today we were asked to help with making a mosaic banner photo for their Facebook to do just that. At first, we had just been asked to research if there was any free online software that could make the image, but we couldn’t find any such software. Our supervisor, Hallie, said that it was fine and that she could find something else for us to do, but we were so invested in the project that we just decided make the whole thing by ourselves on photoshop. When we were done, Hallie was really impressed and she said that her supervisor really liked it too. It was so satisfying to have worked through issues and come up with a finished product that was really appreciated, and it’s also really cool that one of FWV’s clients is actually going to use something that we made.
Today was a two in one, which was very interesting. In the morning, we learned about internal communications, which was about the communication inside of SAS. In the afternoon we learned about external communications, which was around the same principles with monitoring communication, but with the outside world. An interesting thing that happened today was the speaker we saw talking about technology and its help in disaster situations. It was crazy to see how simple technology could affect so many lives. For example, a simple app could provide shelter for thousands of people, for many disaster areas do not have the technology or electricity for the app. It was eye opening and made us think about what we could do with our technology for these situations. We are excited for Legal tomorrow!
