Research Updates

May 2025 

I’ve finished all the computational analyses for my project and now have all the figures and results prepared for my paper. While it feels great to have this major step completed, I'm still a bit unsure about how to best interpret the data and decide what findings I should emphasize in my manuscript. I have a meeting with Brian scheduled later this week to go over these questions. I am aiming to have a full draft finalized by next week, incorporating his feedback and refining the paper. 

Heading into my senior project month, I'm feeling excited to be able to share my work and finish this project I've spent the past 2 years on, but also kind of sad that my time at MA and in MARC class is coming to a close. This class has shaped so much of my high school experience, and it’s where I discovered my interest in neuroscience and research. I’m proud of how far I’ve come and grateful for everything this journey has taught me.

March + April 2025

I've finished writing my introduction and methods sections for my paper! As I'm waiting for Brian to send me more Jupyter Notebook scripts to run, I am working on my results section.

In these last couple months, I look forward to finishing my research paper and delivering a presentation on my research to the MA community at the Wildcat Colloquium in May.

February 2025

I just successfully ran my first Jupyter Notebook script! These scripts are a critical part of my analysis to examine treatment-induced phenotypic changes in cells. The goal is to evaluate how different preprocessing strategies impact the ability to detect statistically significant treatment effects. 

The key technique I’ve used in this analysis is mean Average Precision (mAP), a commonly used metric in machine learning and computational biology to assess the accuracy of phenotypic predictions. Specifically, I’m interested in how various data processing strategies — raw, feature-selected, and spherized profiles — influence the identification of compounds that produce phenotypically active responses. 

January 2025

Brian and I had a meeting to catch up on the progress we've made since winter break. I've finally completed my Python courses and am gearing up to run some data analyses using a platform called Jupyter notebook by the end of this month once Brian sends the code and the datasets to me. I'm excited to apply what I've learned in my courses to real-world data analysis. This feels like a meaningful step in contributing to the project, and I'm looking forward to seeing the impact of our work.

In class we're starting to write the introductions to our scientific papers, so I'm working on explaining important background information regarding the Proteostasis network and its role in cellular aging.

November + December 2024

I had a meeting with Brian to catch up on his progress with imaging and data processing. He gave a thorough explanation of the data analysis pipelines he's developing, and we solidified my portion of the project. Initially the goal was to image different aged cells and build our own clock, but the project has pivoted to focus on building and testing image-based Proteostasis reporter assays, with plans to work on building clocks next spring. My portion of the project will be shifted to reflect this, as I'll focus on helping build and run the analysis pipelines, as well as analyzing and characterizing the different Proteostasis compounds. I presented our progress on my project in an informal lab meeting in class.

Brian and I plan to meet in early January to begin running these pipelines. In the meantime, I've moved on to taking UMich's Python for Everybody specialization and am nearly finished with the first course, Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python). It's been going really well so far, and I'm especially excited for the data analysis courses.

September + October 2024

The Gestwicki lab is currently aging cells within the laboratory and collecting cells of different ages and will begin imaging cells in Mid-October. I'm currently taking Harvard CS50's Introduction to Programming with Python course to prepare for data analysis!

August 2024

I have been working with Brian as a part of the Gestwicki Lab at the UCSF Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases for the past month. I've learned a variety of both wet lab and dry lab techniques including passaging and plating human primary fibroblasts and A549 cell lines and segmenting cell images with CellProfiler. I also have a much better understanding of the background of the project and have been reading and discussing many recent bioimaging papers with Brian to help plan the experiment. Brian is still in the setup phase of the project and should be done passaging the cell lines in November. After that, he will run experiments on the cells with various compounds and we will analyze microscope images to determine the aging effect each compound has on the cell. Until then, I will continue reading papers, practicing CellProfiler, and watching Proteostasis talks to prepare.

April 2023

I'm continuing to expand my knowledge of artificial light's effects on circadian rhythms and completed my literature review on the topic (coming soon!). Following a conversation with researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital about the infeasibility of using humans in my research, I've started to focus on flies as a potential model. I'm excited about my upcoming meetings with scientists in California, and I'm planning on looking into local opportunities at the Buck Institute.