Week 3: Slowed Down in the City

Tibra Wheeler

Another week in the city completed. This week was much slower than the past two and unfortunately not one of the most productive weeks that I’ve had due to the holiday. BUT despite the slowness of the week, I FINALLY GOT CHICK-FIL-A! Everyone who knows me knows I love Chick-Fil-A but we don't have one in Ithaca so this was the highlight of my week. 

  

Early in the week, I did a lot of city exploring and enjoyed just being a tourist. I took the Big Bus, which is a hop-on-hop-off tour bus that takes people around the city explaining the history behind some of New York’s famous buildings. During the tour, I had the chance to visit Wall Street and see the charging bull as well as Trinity Church. I went to the World Trade Center and visited the 9/11 memorial (which was breathtaking by the way). I saw the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park but didn’t get the chance to take the ferry to see it up close (hopefully, in the future). I walked through some of the Central Park Zoo but I only saw some seals who happened to be posing for pictures. As a southern girl, I was very happy to get some great barbecue from Virgil’s BBQ in Times Square. But if you’re from the south, I still don’t recommend getting the sweet tea there! I saw some great views from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. It was amazing being that high above the city in the open air with 360° views. 



I walked through Little Italy, Chinatown, and Koreatown. It was pretty cool to feel the different vibes and cultures in those areas. I got to hang out with some celebrities like Will Smith, Jimmy Fallon, Einstein and the Obamas at Madame Tussauds, which is a wax museum with hundreds of very lifelike figures. I took a trip to Brooklyn and got some really good pizza at Juliana’s Pizza. After eating, I walked it off by walking the different piers on the East River as well as walking on the Brooklyn Bridge. The sites from the bridge were beautiful. The best desserts of the early week came from -321° Ice Cream Shop which serves handmade liquid nitrogen ice cream and from Sweet Churros, which sells a hot cinnamon churro with vanilla ice cream. I also got gelato served in the shape of flower from Amorino Gelato.



New York City is the place to be for great fireworks on the Fourth! The Macy’s fireworks show was nice to watch from the FDR ramp which gave us “front row” seats to the show. It was amazing how all the barges were in sync with each other and how creative fireworks are becoming. I felt the patriotic vibe in the city that night. Watching the Macy’s fireworks show in person is definitely a fun thing to do, but there are so many people so that might be a once in a lifetime thing for me!



Because of the holiday, we didn’t get any more bovine knees to do testing in the bioreactor on. We are supposed to be getting more (and hopefully better) knees in next week so that we can do more mechanical testing and do the following gene expression work on the loaded cartilage samples. Since we didn’t have any knees, I had a lot of downtime in the lab. I worked a little more with my tissue and cell culture techniques by splitting the immortalized chondrocytes I currently have. This was the first time I split the cells without Tony watching, so it was a little nerve-wracking because I didn’t want to mess up. It went pretty well with the exception that it took the cells a little longer to detach from the flask wall because they were so confluent.

After I split my cells, I had a meeting with Dr. Matt Koff. He’s a scientist in the Department of Radiology and Imaging and he’s one of the collaborators I’ll be working with on my mini-project. In our meeting, he showed me some of the techniques he uses when segmenting out cartilage and menisci using ITK-SNAP, a software application used to segment 3D medical images. He also talked me about some of the post-processing that is done in MATLAB after the segmentation is complete. The images that I will be segmenting are knee MRI images that were taken during loading and unloading of the knee measured by a sensor placed there during surgery. I’m hopeful that by helping segment and analyze these images, I will get some in vivo strain values that will be useful to my project back in Ithaca.

I still haven’t been to the OR but I’m looking forward to going next week to shadow Dr. Ranawat so stay tuned for that first experience. I also want to go to clinic with him to see more of the patient interaction and to be able to ask more questions on the clinical side.


In the meantime, cheers to the weekend!

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