Week 8

This week at my lab consisted of mostly preparing for the International Stroke Conference which will be in Hawaii (in February) this year. The reason why we are already preparing for the conference is because every lab had to send in their abstracts for their research projects/studies. I would say that getting to work at the Prabhakaran Lab this summer has probably been one of the most interesting opportunities I have had ever. Working in this lab isn't always the easiest, but all the lab members have made me feel like I belong and helped me tremendously this summer. I would also say that working at this lab gave me a new perspective of what research looks like in STEM because I wasn't working in a lab where experiments were being run (like a typical lab in a Chemistry or Biology class), but instead the research being run were on human subjects. Over these past 9 weeks, I got to work with subjects to help further research about stroke recovery and I got to know every subject individually and learn about their lives outside of being stroke patients.

My favorite part about this lab was getting to sit it on fMRI scans and helping out with the scans. Normally during an MRI scan the patient lies in the machine while images of the brain are being scanned at different angles, but during an fMRI scan the goal is to get images of the brain when a person is carrying out different activities (causing certain areas of the brain to become active). During these scans the subjects had to complete different activities such as pushing different colored buttons or imagining doing certain activities (such as running or jumping).