Week 5: Almost done! But not quite

Hello dedicated readers!

This week was unfortunately less eventful than my previous ones here in NYC. I have been trying to develop a bioinformatics program that can quantify tissue health in patients from plasma and urine samples. As this is not necessarily a novel idea, I dove into the literature to see what other groups are doing. However, I feel it's always more complicated to understand a pre-written code than it is to write one, and after a while of looking into some scripts to run on my data, I decided it might be best to roll up my sleeves and create my own.

At the suggestion of Dr. Prince, one of our program directors for the immersion term, I've put up a picture of me in action. I don't think my research is as visually impressive as what I've seen in some of my colleagues blogs, but I truly love the work I'm doing.


Something that's crossed my mind this past week is how Cornell's BME program is incredibly multidisciplinary. Speaking to my friends in biomechanics labs and the research they are doing here at WCMC, their choice of pursuing graduate studies at Cornell seems obvious. The department is known to be a powerhouse in biomechanics and orthopedics research, but as someone who is not interested in those fields, I must say that I still have had access to everything I've needed for my research and I've been able to ask for help from amazing bioinformaticians. "Any person, any study" really seems to go all the way down to sub-fields of interest.

I'm really excited for the work I'll be doing next week. I will be spending time with a new group in the laboratory medicine division of NYP. Seeing how samples are treated and evaluated for disease after they've been taken from the patient will give me a deeper understanding of the ins-and-outs of what goes on in a hospital, and what I can do back in Ithaca to help. After 5 weeks in the Big Apple, I can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there is still so much for me to do here!

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