BME Summer Immersion 2024

My last week was a busy week, both on the clinical side and also on the research side. I shadowed in the clinic and also in the hospital. On Wednesday, I shadowed a pulmonologist, Dr. Meredith Turetz in her practice. In her practice, Dr. Turetz mostly sees patients with bronchiectasis as well as asthma. The first patient came in as a follow up for severe asthma exacerbations and Dr. Turetz prescribed Symbicort, a medicine that she liked since it had both a fast acting component in a steroid as well as a long acting component in the bronchodilator. In between patients, we also had an interesting conversation on the changing landscape of asthma medication with more biologics being approved now. She also saw a patient who had bronchiestasis as well as a previous non-tuberculosis mycobacteria (NTM) infection. It was interesting to me to learn that even though the airways look dilated in bronchiestasis, the flimsy nature of the airways causes them to collapse resulting in restricted breathi

My final week at immersion consisted of wrapping up surgeries with Shane, analyzing the data collected from the pilot Novelty Induced Hypophagia study, presenting my work amongst my peers and the immersion administration, and going to some of my final NYC bucket list locations.  The surgeries all went well and I was able to help Shane set up for his last few behavioral studies needed for the supplementary figures in his upcoming publication. We found that our pilot study was only effective on male mice, so 15 more males had to undergo fiber optic implantation to generate a well powered assay for later on. I am very thankful to Shane for teaching me so much this summer. The presentation also went well. It was interesting to see what my peers were doing this summer and I was excited to share the experiments that Shane and I had been working on.  I was also able to use the final week as a chance to visit some places in NYC that I had put off. It was very fun going to the Bronx zoo with fr

 During my last week, I was able to shadow two days in surgery with Dr. Milsom and one day in IR with Dr. Pua. Dr. Milsom performed many colonoscopies and took a large tumor out of someone’s abdomen. This surgery was especially cool because Dr. Milsom was worried for several other complications during the surgery but the tumor ended up being easily accessible and removed. We all felt so happy for the patient since the other options would have been much more difficult to live with. On Wednesday we had the immersion dinner and it was lovely. Then Friday, I went to the radiology reception, and was very impressed by the party that they threw in the Central Park Zoo. 

This was the final week of immersion. I spent Monday working on finalizing my final presentation and literature review which I have been working on this summer. On Tuesday, I gave my presentation along with some of my peers. It was cool to see what all the other cardiac people were working on! On Wednesday, I took the day off work to check off an NYC bucket list item, and went to the Bronx zoo. It was a great trip and I saw lots of cool birds. After that, we returned to the upper east side for our farewell dinner with all the immersion students. We had some great conversations with Dr. Wang about the use of AI, and with Kelly about the organizational aspects of immersion. It was a great conclusion to an exciting and productive summer! 

During the final week of the immersion term, I focused on developing a plan to continue several analysis projects into the Fall. At this point, the data transfers are complete, and I have developed a foundational understanding of the datasets and questions that Dr. Cristofanilli's lab is interested in answering. Throughout the summer, I observed the collection of a multitude of liquid biopsy and clinical data types. By shadowing Dr. Cristofanilli in the clinic, I was able to see when and how these data types provide valuable insights into disease progression and may be used to guide patient care. In addition to the intellectual usefulness of this experience, I am very grateful for the emotional element. Engineers don't often get to see the implementation of the work they do, especially in a medical setting. My experiences this summer were centered around the human experience of the result of biomedical research, something that will motivate me throughout my career.  On Tuesday,

 This was my final week working at HSS. On Monday I spent the entire day working with Dr. Anju Malhotra. Dr. Malhotra is an anesthesiologist and focuses on pain management. For this I was shadowing both the clinic and the procedures that he performed. I was mainly interested in this because of the work I am staring up in Ithaca with a focus in pain. This gave me a great deal of insight in how pain is perceived and how it is managed in a clinical setting and could possibly make it easier to transition my pre-clinical work to the clinical side. On Tuesday I spent time in the clinic and spoke with a design engineer about what they do. This meeting was mainly used as a way to gauge what the design engineers do. Their focus is on designing custom implants for special cases. They work very closely with many of the implant manufacture to create implants. They also work closely with surgeons and research engineers in impact development. Since these engineers have a lot of experience working wi