Embryos!

These images are from back in March... these are little baby Nematostella!! The second photo you can see the cilia really well, the other two are just some nice photos of the entire little ball of cells.

Where the Magic Happens!

This is the very intense microscope I use for my data collection!! It is worth much more than I ever will be, and does so many things that when I sit down I barely know where to begin!! I have a lot of fun pressing all the buttons and seeing what happens.

In this picture a slide is all set up, I'm actually taking some time lapse and Z-stack data on my embryos I spawned yesterday, the first couple of images looked good and it will be running all night, I don't even have to do anything until tomorrow morning! This microscope is amazing!

Hopefully I can upload some images from my test run tomorrow! I'm still not sure how to get my images from the computer OFF the computer... The simple things in life that I have trouble with...

First Spawning of the Summer!

Began spawning Stack 6 today! Here they are... no, they don't look like the anemones from Finding Nemo but they're related! I want to get a close up picture of one of the Nematostella but my camera phone isn't very good at taking good pictures...

Tomorrow I'm doing the test run of our multidimensional acquisition data with these embryos so hopefully I'll have some cool data to post on Friday!

CAS Research Award

I got the CAS Research Award!! I found out that I was one of the 6 chosen out of about 50 or 60 applicants... pretty exciting!! I'm in Miami now working on the project... hopefully lots of updates will be posted in the next 10 weeks!!

Information!

First post, just some background information on what exactly this... "blog"... is really all about!

Basically, I decided I wanted to keep a website with updates on my Undergraduate research projects, and hopefully continue this in the future with my graduate and post-graduate projects. I am a Sophomore at the University of Miami, and I recently became involved in the Undergraduate Research department, and have really fallen in love with what I do. In essence, I want to share my research projects and education and hopefully inspire at least one person, hopefully more, to go into the research field. Although I am personally Pre-Med, I believe that a background in research is vitally important if you want to go into the medical field. By participating in research as a medical professional, you can make an incredible contribution to not just one patient, but to people all over the globe, something that I find incredible. I want to be a part of finding the cures for the diseases I will (hopefully) be diagnosing in the future, not just sitting idly waiting for others to accomplish these feats. I believe every medical professional should be participating, because really who knows debilitating diseases better than the people who are constantly trying to help patients with these diseases every day of their lives? Just my personal opinion.

So what exactly do I do right now? I am part of the team lead by Dr. William Browne, who specializes in invertebrate developmental biology, as one of his Undergraduate students. I am learning basic microscope and lab techniques, and working specifically with the specimen Nematostella vectensis, or the sea anemone. As I continue working on my undergraduate thesis I hope to gain strides in understanding the embryonic neurological development of these creatures.

So far that's it! I'll continue updating every so often with pictures and information. Hope you enjoy!