8/29/26
I went to visit the lab in Munich! It was truly such an amazing experience; I was only there for a week, but I wish I had been able to stay longer. All the remote work I completed prior definitely helped me prepare for discussing the project with postdocs, other researchers, and attending meetings. I learned so much about research in general, and am excited to hopefully keep exploring some kind of research in college. The project has been progressing nicely, though with school starting back, it has been a bit tough to put in similar hours to what I was doing over the summer. I'm excited to keep working and hope that I will be able to submit for publication by the end of this year.
5/22/26
Our proposal got accepted, and I'm very excited to start working on the project. Now I'm focused on reading papers, learning Python, and figuring out when I'm going to visit the lab in Munich.
5/4/26
Last week, I had another early call with Dr. Umer at 6:30 am to discuss our project proposal. We decided to pivot slightly to really build off of the CytoDiff paper and experimenting/employing a new model into the framework for extracting image features. We are focusing on training the model on latent space embeddings rather than the image space. We will be using the same dataset that CtyoDiff used, the Munich AML Morphology Dataset, but that may change as we continue developing the project. I have a lot to learn both technically and conceptually, but I'm hoping we can get the proposal accepted soon.
4/20/26
After an early 5 am Zoom call last week, I partnered with Dr. Rao Umer from the Institute of AI for Health (AIH) in Munich, Germany. I am technically also under the mentorship of Dr. Carsten Marr, the director of the institute, though Dr. Umer will be providing most of the guidance. As of now, we are working to design a research proposal to get approved by Dr. Marr so that we can begin our research. We are exploring different possibilities for the datasets we would like to look at, and we are leaning towards blood cell types. This work is meant to help with the diagnostics of cancer, so I'm very excited to be entering this field.