Internship
About the Internship
The big picture of Dr.Jason Doles' Cancer Cachexia research is to study how tumors disrupt an organism in order to promote muscle wasting. The lab focuses on the various responses of the the organism and different interventions to counteract the mass loss, thus helping the vast majority of cancer patients and cancer treatments. This is very applicable since over 80% of cancer patients develop muscular degradation due to cancer.
Workplace
The current strengths I have as a teammate as a part of this lab is efficiency and cooperativity. In the work that I do as a part of this internship and lab, I can complete the work I am given relatively quickly and the lab has only improved my efficiency. I also believe my ability to work with others is great and has improved from this lab. This year, I want to improve as a professional and teammate by understanding feedback and understanding the topics of the internship.
My role:
At the beginning of this internship, I took on a shadowing role, learning from the PhD students on various techniques and seeing what they do and how everything works in the lab, this is a very common practice amongst reserach labs, to bring in a new person under a shadowing role, then the new researcher chooses what they would like to do to contribute. During the end of the first semester of the internship, I decided I wanted to conduct immunofluorescence staining in the lab in order to help with the quantification of the Phds' projects at the time. Immunofluorescence staining is a protocol where the size of myotubes can be measured through the use of primary and secondary antibodies along with DAPI in order to stain for the nuclei of the muscle cells. This plays an important role in the study of cancer cachexia since the muscle degradation is the key factor that is being investigated seeing the different sizes from the IF staining is vital to seeing how muscle sizes differ in cachetic models. In addition, a wide variety of cancer models can be stained for such as varying ages of mice and varying levels of stress in mice. This overall verifies that cancer cachexia is present and different factors that play a role into cachexia can be studied further, contributing to the large role of Dr.Doles' research.
Diversity:
A large part of the reason I enjoyed conducting research with Dr. Doles' and his team so much, was because of the large amounts of diversity present in this research group. Everyone in the group is from different places, no one grew up in the same region, this provides very diverse perspectives to the research as a whole. Myself included, we all have have/had very different undergraduate experiences from the focus in undergraduate education to the ciriculum differences at the various education institutions attended by the group. During lab meetings, we frequently discuss solutions to new problems that may arrive in the lab, we typically solve this very quickly due to the vast diversity in the lab and simply because of the fact that everyone can contribute through their different thought processes.
Though a lot can be said about the diversity within Dr. Doles' research group itself, he goes beyond the research group and advocates for inclusion of diverse groups at various conferences. He frequently discusses with the research group and at research conferences, the improtance of social justice in regards to research and diverse groups will lead to stronger research environments. In addition to giving talks about diversity and inclusion in research, Dr. Doles is also the Vice chair for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiology, IU School of Medicine.
