Harry Zou - Dr. Rhee: Week 1 - 6/3/24 to 6/7/24

We started the week off with an orientation on immersion and what we should expect from it. Then, on Tuesday we met with Dr. Min and Dr. Sabuncu who introduced themselves and talked about their careers. Directly following this meeting, I met with my mentor for immersion this summer Dr. Kyu Rhee. During this meeting, we talked about our respective research interests and came up with a plan on the research that I will be doing this summer. One potential avenue that we discussed would be to help one of his lab techs on their work in small molecule mass spectrometry for their work on analyzing antibiotics for tuberculosis. Antibiotic development typically consists of several rounds of screening via phenotypic infererencing wherein a library of compounds are added to the bacteria and you get a digital output of if the bacteria died or did not die. What Dr. Rhee proposes would be using mass spectrometry to get more data from these screenings i.e. what compounds are present in the bacteria and how much of the compound made it into the bacteria. I then went to the Rhee Lab meeting and one of the postdocs gave a presentation on their paper looking at the effects of rifampicin, a common antibiotic used for tuberculosis. 

Unfortunately, for the rest of the week, I was and still am quite sick so I was unable to get any research or clinical shadowing done. However, I did read some review papers that Dr. Rhee sent me and also did any trainings that I needed to complete. Hopefully, by next week, I will feel better to start!

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