Fall Core
Fall quarter was by far my most stressful quarter at UW. My classes were very intensive and while I was expecting this since I had heard about Fall quarter core from upperclassmen in BioE, I was not expecting things to be this stressful. It was honestly very difficult to manage my workload and there were times when I felt like giving up but at the end of the day it all went well.
My favorite memory from fall quarter is hanging out with my friends until 1 AM in the Foege Hall conference rooms. We has two major assignments due every Wednesday and so Tuesdays were very long days for us. By the end of the quarter, we had a tradition of having dinner together in the Foege Conference rooms. We would usually order dinner from Aqua Verde or McDonalds.
My favorite memory from fall quarter is hanging out with my friends until 1 AM in the Foege Hall conference rooms. We has two major assignments due every Wednesday and so Tuesdays were very long days for us. By the end of the quarter, we had a tradition of having dinner together in the Foege Conference rooms. We would usually order dinner from Aqua Verde or McDonalds.
Cooking for myself
I learned how to cook over the summer and got a lot better at it in fall! I also started trying out new dishes and got into baking food a lot more. Probably the best dish I cooked was lasagna! I decided to make a wall of food to showcase my cooking. I call it The Food Wall.
Link: The Food Wall
Link: The Food Wall
Mary Gates Research Scholarship
I was awarded the Mary Gates Research Scholarship in Winter 2020 for my project in the Mack lab. In this project, I propose to complete a cross platform drug study for drug discovery in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). DMD is a lethal genetic disease that primarily affects skeletal and cardiac muscle. In DMD, the dystrophin protein of muscle becomes non-functional which effectively means that muscles no longer have a shock absorber and lose some of their ability to send and receive signals to neighboring muscle cells.
In my project, I propose to complete a drug study that could potentially discover drugs to treat DMD. I am specifically looking at drugs that block calcium channels in muscle cells. It is believed that the lack of functional dystrophin leads to increased levels of calcium in cells which eventually leads to cell death by causing major dysfunction in the mitochondria.
I will be facilitating drug discovery by using patient derived induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) and a novel rat model. My focus in the next two quarters will be completing the drug study on the hiPS cells.
Update: I also got a second award of the Mary Gates Scholarship!
The video below shows the cardiomyocytes I cultured in lab. The picture on the right is a colony of iPSC cells a few days before I started differentiations them into cardiomyocytes.
In my project, I propose to complete a drug study that could potentially discover drugs to treat DMD. I am specifically looking at drugs that block calcium channels in muscle cells. It is believed that the lack of functional dystrophin leads to increased levels of calcium in cells which eventually leads to cell death by causing major dysfunction in the mitochondria.
I will be facilitating drug discovery by using patient derived induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) and a novel rat model. My focus in the next two quarters will be completing the drug study on the hiPS cells.
Update: I also got a second award of the Mary Gates Scholarship!
The video below shows the cardiomyocytes I cultured in lab. The picture on the right is a colony of iPSC cells a few days before I started differentiations them into cardiomyocytes.
Winter Quarter
Looking back at winter, it was a very interesting quarter. Everything started off just like any other quarter but ended in a very different way. This was the first time I did online exams and with the pandemic worsening, I might be going back to my home country very soon. On a happier note, I feel that this quarter was much more enjoyable than my fall since my course loads were a little lighter and I met my friends in BioE almost every other week for movie or game nights.
Spring Quarter- My flight back home
So here I am back in India. Traveling was an interesting experience, it took me 16 hours to fly from San Francisco to Delhi and 10 to get out of the airport because of the health screens and the fact that the airport was jam packed because flights to India were shutting down the next day. Fortunately, I met two other people from my class so that made things a little less terrible.