Weekly WISE #5
Our final week of the summer will close out with a blog post by Emily U. and Gemma F. Also check out our Program Highlights page for all the Summer 2024 SSEP highlights!
Emily U, Research Assistant in the Faculty of Medicine
Hi everybody! My name is Emily Underhay and I am a student research assistant for the faculty of Medicine! Unlike the other wise girls you’ve read about, my placement is not at MUN but at the Recovery and Performance lab at the Miller center! This week at my placement I have shadowed several of my lab mates while they conduct their studies and have gotten to interact with these participants myself. We have many studies happening simultaneously at the lab, including; Brain mapping, HITMS, MIMS, PRIML, Genetics MS study, MS can rehab, Revital-age and AGE-ility. Some of my shadowing this week has been on fitness testing and Revital-Age. The Revital-age study has a few components like forms including the moca test which tests the participants cognitive function and short term memory! It also includes the technology in our lab like the Transcranial magnetic stimulator (TMS), the Kin Arm, and our pressure sensored walkway. These machines are very useful for looking at gait variability, balance, pressure on your feet, fine motor skills and the time it takes for a signal to leave the TMS machine, go through your cranial pathways and nerves to reach the muscle we have targeted!
There’s never a dull moment in the Rap Lab. This past week we attended one of our lab mates PhD defense and then celebrated with Indian food and desserts! We’ve done many tours over the summer but we have since clued those up around a week ago now, my favorite tour was of the School of Medicine at Memorial! Along with the tours we’ve also had social nights throughout the summer: A movie night, Trivia night (with a prize) and we had a secret social event on Friday we all guessed it would be escape rooms and it was actually a night at the Clay Cafe! I could not attend due to an appointment at a conflicting time but I’m sure the girls will have the best time ever and I can’t wait to hear all about it!
As we enter our last week of the program I can’t help but reflect on what my summer would’ve been like if I didn’t check my spam folder! Thinking about it now I know that I wouldn’t have had this much fun or met all these amazing people. I definitely wouldn’t have learned as much as I did and I wouldn’t have figured out what I want to do after graduation this year. I can’t express how grateful I am for this opportunity with WISE and I can’t wait to get the girls in my community going to grade 11 excited about this, I have so much to tell them! As grateful as I am for all the learning experiences and networking opportunities I have to say one of the best experiences of this summer has been bonding with the other WISE girls and becoming friends with them! I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us!
Gemma F, Computational Biochemistry Research Assistant
Hi! My name is Gemma F. and this summer I’m working as a Computational Biochemistry Research Assistant with Dr. Katie Wilson as my supervisor. As the name suggests, I do research in the biochemistry department, but instead of in a wet lab, it’s all on computers! To generate my simulations, I have to submit jobs (files that contain script) to a Compute Canada supercomputer, gather and graph the data from the output files of those jobs, and use a program called video molecular dynamics (VMD) to render a visual representation of the simulations.
For my project, I’m analyzing the structures of glyco-tRNA and comparing it to that of an unmodified tRNA. Glyco-tRNA is a new discovery of tRNA that has a chain of glucose (glycan)attached to it. This week, I gathered some data on the RMSD, RMSF, and H-bonds of my glyco-tRNA molecule from my first replicate of the simulation. I then created data tables and graphed the different types of data Microsoft Excel.
We didn’t have any workplace tours this week, but I did get to attend the annual biochemistry symposium with Dr. Wilson’s group! The symposium is a conference where the whole biochemistry department gets together and the students present the work that they’ve been doing over the summer. There was also a keynote speaker from McGill university, and one of the MUN biochem professors did a talk about the Terry Fox Research Institute and the Atlantic Cancer Consortium. It was really cool to learn about all of the incredible and diverse work that’s going on in the biochemistry department.
Overall, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my WISE NL experience, and I can’t believe it’s coming to an end so soon–next week! I’ve really loved meeting the other girls in this program, and will definitely miss them and this experience when it’s all over.