Internship

Workplace

My strength as a team member in this lab have been communication and adaptability. I was new to many of the protocols and programs that are used in the lab and have needed to speak up when I was confused. Communication with my PI has been important in fully understanding the tasks assigned to me so I have the necessary knowledge to complete them. Additionally, listening attentively to the senior members of the lab has been important because they given me advice on how to best succeed both in the lab and personally. I have developed more skills on how to be more adaptable in the lab. Not every experiment goes exactly the way we may want it to, so being able to adjust my procedure and thinking through the next steps in the research has made a difference in the way I work with the team to get results. 

I would like to continue growing as a teammate this year by not only understanding the work I am assigned, but also understand the work of my lab peers. Learning each person's role in the research and listening to the others' findings is crucial in seeing the big picture of the research goals. 

I would also like to grow as a professional by continuing to challenge myself by learning new things that may be out of my comfort zone and gain independence. I have been learning different programs that aid in the visualization of protein structure prediction and it was not something I was familiar with in the past. Now, I feel confident in exploring more programs for analysis. In addition, I have been performing experiments that I learned last semester and now I feel more independent in carrying out the procedure. I still require some assistance from my mentor and other lab mates, but I am more confident in the steps that I am doing. If I can continue learning outside of my comfort zone, it will help me become more well rounded in my field and help me be independent. 

Contributions

My independent project is using various computational analysis programs to be able to generate theoretical protein structures of mutations of Amot that are being used to compare against previously determined models. In my contributions I have generated ~80 models. The amount of models created are helpful because when doing our comparison, we can see which models is more refined for the predicted structure. This helps us better understand the structure and link it to the function of the protein.

In this lab, it is important to have a team of people who have different perspectives because others may have more inventive ways to approach the research. All the members of the lab are older than me, so I have been fortunate enough to work with experienced lab members. They have taught me a lot about how to apply things that I have learned before in chemistry and biology labs to our research. I am also writing more about my research and hearing feedback on how to improve from those who have presented their own research. They have helped me understand how to reference back to the overall goal and purpose of the research. Working with them has encouraged me to be more confident in learning from the research process, but also asking for help when I need it. 

Example of Mutation Using PyMol - Alphafold130 R153A