Day3 – CA Work Experience Program

Third Day Thrills

This morning once Kendyl, Sonia, Linda and I arrived at the office we met with Senior Account Executive – Ms. Hollyn Page. We shadowed her all morning and got to sit in on various meetings/conference calls discussing the agency’s oldest (and one of their largest) clients: Wrangler. The most interesting meeting, in my opinion, was one between her and Ms. Lauren French going over their notes from “Market Week”. This hectic week consists of conference calls with magazines and other publications discussing their potential interest in featuring items from the newest collection. We even got a sneak peek of the look book for a collab between Wrangler and a popular clothing brand (one we all love clothes from but cannot name since it hasn’t launched yet), so we got to see the unreleased collection!

notes from last year’s “market week” after meeting with Associate Fashion Editor – Danielle Flum of Cosmopolitan

sonia and I with a wrangler sign – George Strait

Day 3- Problem Shooting

Yesterday, before leaving the lab, I ran a trial testing a catalyst another student had made, only using a higher concentration of methane in the reactants. We expected to see a proportionate change in the resulting methane concentration after running through the reactor, but saw almost no change. Thus begins our problem shooting.

While waiting for measurements to come in, I drew schematics of the GC to be explained in tomorrow’s post

There were a couple essential areas of fault here: method (experimentor systematic error), the measuring device (systematic error- is the GC insensitive to methane?) and the flow meters (random error- if the flow of one gas changes randomly as the regulators are wont to do, it will change the concentration of the reactant mixture randomly)

The rest of the day was spent trying to isolate these areas of error. The major method fault is that we cannot separate the independent variables of time (always changing) and temperature (what we want to change to evaluate the effectiveness of our catalyst). If the catalyst deteriorates with time (due to oxidization of the materials) then the consecutive trials will lower in reaction yield even with an increase in temperature, a change that generally spurs reactions to become more active. We were, however, able to rule out the sensistivity of our machine by running 100% methane through the GC and seeing a doubling of the output relative to the 50% mixture we left yesterday with. This means that the failure to change between yesterday’s two mixtures (going from 3% to 50%) was due to some other issue. We then took two more trials at the same heat and saw a regressive curve with consecutive trials. It appeared that our catalyst had a lifespan. In order to fix this, Dr. Hotz showed Maya how to pretreat the catalyst while I worked on collecting calibration points.

Day 3: Balancing, Dry Needling, and Body Connections

Today, I was once again mostly observing all the therapists working. I did continue cleaning tables, preparing hot and cold packs for patients, and continue preparing HEP2Go work sheets for patients and uploading them to their documents tab. There were some gaps between patients and Jeffrey helped me try a few exercises that patients commonly do when looking to improve balance. Dan and Jeffrey always express how important it is to actually do the exercises that the patients are doing from time to time to better understand how the patient is feeling. The exercises I did were all balance related as Jeffrey had me start by balancing on one leg on both sides. He then had me set a semi-hard foam under my feet and had me then try balancing on one leg again. The foam was obviously a softer and more malleable surface than the ground and thus required my ankles to work a lot harder to help me keep myself balanced and upright. The next thing Jeffrey had my stand on was an inflated circle disk that almost resembled a squished ball. Although Jeffrey asked me to try standing on it with one leg each, he explained that with patients that may need more support, they may ask that the patient have one foot on the ground and one foot on the disk then may have the patient catch and throw a ball or perhaps reach out to touch a ball placed in different locations. After the disk, Jeffrey had me balance on a Bosu Ball with one leg. All these exercises – standing on the floor, the foam, the disk, the Bosu Ball – are often combine with either throwing and catching a ball or with reaching out to touch the ball that would be placing in various locations. Finally, Jeffrey had me try to most challenging balancing method: flipping the Bosu Ball over and trying to stand on it that way. Typically, it’s extremely challenging to stand on the Bosu Ball this way and even more so with only one leg. Jeffrey explained that, for this reason, they typically had patients stand on the upside-down Bosu Ball with both legs and instead do squats.

While I wasn’t trying exercises with Jeffrey, I was observing him, Dan, Parker, and Kim at work. In the morning, Kim had a patient that had stiffness and limited mobility in her neck. Kim is well-versed in dry needling and was dry needling the patients neck and using e-stim along with the needling. I have seen needling done in many other places, but I had never seen it done in the neck. It was interesting because when using the e-stim and needle to achieve a twitch, you could actually see the patients head moving with each twitch, or her shoulders (depending on where Kim was needling). Kim also explained that it’s important, when dry needling, to needle along the entire myofascial line or fascial line. A myofascial line is quite literally a line of connective tissue that runs through your body. Kim explain that it is much more effective to target an entire line than focus on the muscle in only one sections that make up only part of the line. This wasn’t the only time when connections throughout the body, and their importance, were brought to light. Another patient who comes in for back pain was being treated and the therapist told him that his tight hamstrings were a contributing factor to his back pain. It’s incredible how part of your leg is able to greatly affect another area such as your back. Most people would never think to assume that something as small as tightness in a certain area could affect so much more in your body, even when the locations are far from one another on the body.

Day 3: Testing Toxins

Today I took a break from my reading and research and traveled to one of the neighboring labs here in the National Toxicology Program. I ventured out of the pathology group and instead joined Dr. Michael DeVito, leader of the Predictive Toxicology and Screening Group, for the day. For a few trying hours in the morning, we attended a mandatory NTP meeting focused on statistics, citations, and publication format; I may have been the only high school student in the room, but I was not the only one that struggled to remain attentive. Later, though, I had the much more exciting opportunity to join Dr. DeVito and his lab staff. One of their current projects is focused on creating a predictive model of the liver that can be used to efficiently test various chemicals for toxicity. While traditional in vitro, or outside of an organism, hepatocyte (liver cells) cultures are grown in two dimensions, Dr. DeVito has found a method to grow these cells in sphere culture systems, similar to stem cells. This three-dimensional innovation has allowed in vitro toxicology and carcinogenic testing to more accurately model the biological effects on human organs than the effects measured in cells grown in two dimensions. More accurate in vitro testing also allows for a decreased reliance on in vivo, or inside of an organism, testing. I also learned about some of the equipment used in Dr. DeVito’s lab, such as a mass spectrometer (MS) and liquid chromatographer. The MS is used to finely quantitate the mass of molecules down to a couple of decimal places, and the liquid chromatographer is used to identify the different chemicals in a mixture.

While in Dr. DeVito’s lab, I also learned about how toxicology testing works in a real-world context. When a company finds a new chemical compound to use in their products, they must first gain approval from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) or the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), which nominates the chemical to the NIEHS or NTP. The National Toxicology Program is then responsible for finding if the chemical has negative effects, and if so, at what dosage. Here is a very elementary description of this process:

Dr. DeVito and his lab grow cell cultures in wells, then splash them with a fluorescent dye that sticks to the nucleus of each cell; next, using a handy motorized pipette, they dissolve the dye with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a universal solvent; next, they wash the cells with a phosphate-buffered saline solution a couple of times (I was allowed to complete this); finally, they splash the cells with whichever chemical they are testing for toxicology.

After a period of incubation, they take the cells out and insert them into a fluorescence microplate reader, which reads the fluorescence signature from each well and compiles the measurements into a document, so at the end of reading there are 384 measurements (one for each well) compiled. The premise of the test is that the less fluorescence emitted by a well, the fewer nuclei in the well, which means fewer cells, which means more cell death. So, Dr. DeVito and his lab can predict at what dosage cell death begins to take place by measuring the dosage at which the fluorescence begins to decrease. This test, however, is simply to find out whether or not chemicals are harmful at any reasonable dosage. The real challenge, which is far beyond my understanding, is identifying how the chemicals harm the cells and what these damages translate to in terms of humans.

If there was one thing that I took away from my time in Dr. DeVito’s lab, though, it was not their intriguing projects nor their complicated machines: it was that collaboration is an essential part of their research. No one person is an expert in everything or even more than one thing, and everyone relies on each other to complete the work.

Day 3- Dueling Dinosaurs

Today was perhaps the most exciting day yet at the FWV offices. Today i was working with the STEM team which advertises mostly for science, medical, tech, and electronics companies. To start the day off we were able to sit in on a huge brainstorm sesh with the creative and stem teams. The Brainstorm was for a secret project at the North Carolina Science Museum involving something called the “Dueling Dinosaurs”. It was ur job to brainstorm some celebrity endorsment for the event as well as come up with ways to advertise the event. The brainstorming session was perhaps the best part of the day. It was so refreshing to see the energy and enthusiasm and it was like a free flowing conversation.

After that i went through a media list of medical magazines, picking out ones that specifically focus on at home geriatric and emergency care. I then had to format it into an excel spreadsheet and send it over to the STEM dept.

Third day at FHI 360!

Our third day at FHI360 was a very interesting when. Today, we went to the company’s lab where they test their products for quality. The main items that the CTID group produces is contraceptives, so we learned all about how contraceptives are tested before being shipped abroad. In other words, we saw condoms get blown up! The purpose of this was to test the greatest volume and pressure that a condom could withstand. We also saw them get filled with water to be tested for holes. After learning about all of the various quality tests performed on condoms, we learned about the more chemistry oriented side of the process. At the lab, scientists used various devices and tools to analyze oral contraceptives to ensure that they contained the desired amount of a certain substance. Surprisingly, I actually understood a lot of what they did- thanks Mr. Rushin!

All in all, it was a dry interesting, informative day. Looking forward to the rest of my time here!

Day 3

Today I got to get more hands on in the lab. The first thing that I got to do was go into the tissue culture lab which is a room full of incubators keeping cancer cells alive at normal body temperatures. One of the MDs explained that after extracting cancer cells from a patient in the OR, they are taken to the tissue lab where they are incubated and cultured for growth. Upon growth, they are injected into the lab mice where active cancer growth is observed to be treated with different types of test drugs using computational biology. I got to observe colorectal cancer cells under a microscope while assorting them in different petri dishes under the fume hood. The second thing that I got to do in the lab today was extract DNA from the collected cancer cells. It was interesting to note that extracting the DNA was not at all an arduous task. And yesterday, when I got to observe one of the MDs deal with buffer solutions, I realized that this was the aftermath to what I got to do today. Essentially, to discover the proteins in the RNA of the cancer lines, they first extract the DNA from the cancer cell lines which is converted into RNA, then placed in a buffer solution where, in a two day process, we can determine the existing proteins and pick different drugs to test on these proteins to see which drug weakens them most. But after extracting the DNA and using the incubator to cultivate it, I got to put it on a small slide and observe its architecture under a microscope. It was interesting to see the stark differences but also the subtle similarities between the different cancer cells under the microscope. I got to observe some cancer cells that had been in the incubator for weeks and were flourishing while I also got to observe fresh cancer cells, not yet grown. I also got to observe colorectal cancer cells and kidney cancer cells and noted the differences between those two as well.

Today I also got to take a paraffin block containing cancer cell tissue, slice it, soak it, and put it in a slide for analysis. What I got to do was dye the sliced piece of cancer tissue so that its architecture and makeup is observable under a microscope. And then it can be delivered to the tissue culture lab to be kept in an incubator so that we can visibly see its makeup and whether it is primarily comprised of organoids or fibroblasts. What Dr. Hsu came in and explained to me was that fibroblasts often grow in cancer cell tissue and overtake the organoids inhibiting their growth. This is a big problem when it comes to developing cancer cell lines because the cancer cell lines aren’t pure enough to evaluate for research, and even when they try and purify the lines to allow more pure cancer cells to grow, the fibroblasts still invade the organoids and often make it difficult to see the organoids. What’s nice though is that the makeup of organoids vs. fibroblasts are very different. Fibroblasts are long, weed-like organisms whereas organoids look like clumps of cells. It’s very difficult to get a pure cancer cell line of organoids, so Dr. Hsu has assigned Sarah and I the task of constructing pure organoid cancer cell lines. It’s difficult because as soon as you cut up the cancer tissue and attempt to grow it in separate petri dishes, we create a comfortable environment for the fibroblasts to grow also. So starting today we began to work in the tissue lab to design a procedure to properly construct organoid cancer cell lines without fibroblasts getting in the way. What Dr. Hsu did explain to me though is that the reason why not much research has been diverted to being able to construct these organoid cancer cells without the fibroblasts is that since fibroblasts grow with the growth of cancer cell lines when injected into mice, this in fact helps research how to treat the cancer considering the growth of other cells also. Fibroblasts are key in determining what types of drugs are potent enough to defeat cancer cells because they grow inside of the human body also.

Day 3 at Pentair – I forgot to hit save ://

Today I arrived at Pentair at 9:00am, a little later then yesterday. I felt like a true employee, using my keycard to enter the building. Today was an especially interesting day at the office, as it was “closing day”. “Closing Day” is at the end of every month, where every employee has a lot of work due. The office was quieter in the morning and as people began to finish up their month’s work, the office was filled with chatter. I got to meet a few interesting people, most of whom worked in finance. We talked about a wide variety of things and I even got some advice on what classes I should take in college.

When I wasn’t chatting with the recently freed employees, I had some other tasks given to me by Dr. Rai. First I read over a bunch of documents, to help me understand the project Dr. Rai was working on. I read the manuals of the fish pump, both the 6 inch and 8 inch models. Dr. Rai pointed out an interesting line in one of the manuals that was put in as a little companywide joke, I can’t remember exactly what it said, but basically it explained the company warranty does not protect against any “acts of god”. Ha ha, I can’t believe that made it in there.

After the reading, I went back to work on my Geneva mechanism project. The project was broken into three main steps. The first, which I did the majority of yesterday, was designing and creating each individual piece. The second step was to bring all the pieces together in assembly, which I did today. I learned more about the software, solid works, and how helpful it is. It was not easy, but I think I can getting better and better as the days have gone on. The final step, which I hope to complete tomorrow it to actually run the mechanism, with an add in called “simulation”. Unfortunately, I forgot to save the new assembly file before lunch, and lost my progress for step 2. I was a little bummed at first, but then I realized it would be good practice for me to put it back together. And sure enough I was able to put the pieces back together in record time! (for me) After I finished step 2, I had some time left over and I was able to mess around with the colors of my creation and decide to go with the classic gold and blue. Right about now would be great time for me to add in a picture of that, but I forgot to take one. Oh well, tomorrow maybe.

Day 3: There’s a New Doc in Town

Today was a little different, because instead of shadowing Dr. Dupuy, I was shadowing Dr. Durand-Smith. At this particular office, doctors get one weekday off each week, and today just happened to be that day for Doctor Dupuy. Either way, I had a great time with Dr. Durand, and it was interesting to see two different techniques to the same job. Like Dr. Dupuy, Dr. Durand had a lot of well-checks or physicals, and a few abstract appointments as well. In the first minute of meeting her, she was very open and informed me about a particularly unique patient. This patient’s feet turned white, purple, and were freezing, and eventually the patient had to use a wheelchair because she was not able to walk on her feet which felt like they had needles going through them. Dr. Durand thought this was Raynaud’s disease combined with chilblains. Raynuad’s is a disease in which a part of your body feel numb and cold in response to cold temperatures or even stress. Chilblain is a medical diagnosis to describe a painful, itching swelling on the skin from poor circulation. When the patients feet were iced, they turned a bright red color and were swollen, indicators of this chilblain phenomenon. However, Dr. Durand was not hesitant to seek extra help, getting in contact with multiple duke doctors in dermatology, rheumatology, and neurology.

While this particular patient was in the back of her mind all day, Dr. Durand had a number of wellness checks for today. The first couple started in the morning, with the patients being two and under. I observed as Dr. Durand checked the babies knees, hips, back, heart, lungs, eyes, ears, nose, stomach, and privates. There were a few things that were different than Dr. Dupuy’s checkups I had seen the day before. Dr. Durand checked the patient’s knees and eyes, while Dr. Dupuy spent that time to have more in-depth conversations about food intake, nights, pooping, etc. Dr. Durand also talked about these subjects but usually when prompted by the mothers after the doctor asked “is there anything of concern today”. What I learned was that neither approach was better than one another, but unique to each doctor. What is again so interesting is that if I do decide to study medicine, you have a large canvas to decide and create whatever doctor patient experience you would like to.

In the afternoon, Dr. Durand mostly saw teenagers. Most of these appointments were also wellness checks, so I sat in her office to not make the patient uncomfortable (considering we were around the same age). While in her office she gave me a textbook to read called The Atlas of Pediatric Physical Diagnosis. With more than 500 pages, I mostly flipped through and looked at the pictures and their captions. However, there were about three to four pictures per page, so I had a lot of reading to do. It was incredibly interesting with subjects ranging from orthopedic studies to surgical observations.

After all of the teenage wellness checks ended, I accompanied her to a sick patient appointment. This patient complained of not being able to hear out of her left ear after using her q-tip to clean her ear. This would of course be concerning, but Dr. Durand already had a hypothesis of the problem – ear wax. She thought that by using the q-tip, the patient had pushed her ear wax towards her ear drum, blocking it’s ability to hear. After using a water pressurizer machine to loosen the ear wax from the back of her ear drum, Dr. Durand used a tool to pull a dark glump of ear wax greater than the size of the pea. Of course this sounds disgusting, but it was actually awesome. She preformed the same procedure on the other ear, and received a similar sized glump of dark ear wax. Other than being super cool, the patient remarked how she was able to hear better than she had in a long time.

I am so excited for my last day at the office!

Day 3- NH3 and Stickers

Despite the background check obstacle, I shadowed Ms. Mackenzie today instead of Lisa. I started off the day putting stickers on cups for storm water samples, then I proceeded to cutting off stickers from 200+ filters so they could be recycled. I also watched her make the buffer solutions and other reagents for one of the machines.

The rest of the day I worked with her and tested for NH3 in various water samples. Each sample took around 90 seconds to process and there were ~120 samples to do. The samples are put into little glass jars and a probe comes to extract some of the water. The water then goes through a bunch of tubes and the NH3 is measured at a wavelength of 660 nm (absorption test). My job was to write down how many micrograms/L of NH3 were in each sample. She taught me how to work the program (AACE and QuAAtro) and had me input titles for some of the samples.

Going along with my other post, I found out that Ms. Mackenzie also has a favorite type of pen (staples postscript .7 mm).

Image 1: NH3 Machine

Image 2: Computer & lab sheet

Image 3: My pile of stickers and filters