Blog #1: Road to Research

After choosing a topic, I spent time gathering research and narrowing down my research question during the first half of the semester. I found that there is a lot of research currently being done on Alzheimer's disease. This new information made me rethink my topic and focus on Parkinson's disease instead since it is similar to Alzheimer's disease, but less research has been done. The main hole I found in the research on Parkinson's disease is the cause. Researchers have found that Parkinson's is an effect of a decrease of dopamine in the brain due to brain cells dying. However, it has not been discovered why this happens. I was curious if being a more logical or creative thinker would affect how early and quickly the disease progresses. This is referred to as right-brained or left-brained. Left-brained individuals are more logical and analytical thinkers, and right-brained individuals are more creative and imaginative. My research question was, how does the progression of Parkinson's disease differ between right-brained and left-brained people? I planned to conduct a survey on a group of patients with Parkinson's disease made up of questions from different online surveys to determine what type of thinker you are. I would then ask questions about their age and how quickly their Parkinson's has progressed, and what age they got diagnosed with Parkinson's.

During the class research symposium in October, I realized that I would need a lot of help from an advisor for this project to work. I would need an advisor to provide me with the patients for the trial and communicate with the participants to keep their identities anonymous. I emailed three neurologists in Colorado who work with Parkinson's patients, but unfortunately, none responded. Without an advisor, this project was no longer possible. I was forced to go back to the beginning and find a new topic to research.

I started by going through the topics I researched over the summer. I decided to focus on space exploration since it was my second choice to study in the first place. I spent some time collecting more research and found a lot of information about Mars and the rover we sent to the surface of the Red Planet last year. Since I had a late start to this new project, I figured it would be best to do a project that would not require an IRB or SRC approval. Through my research, I found that when Andy Weir wrote the novel The Martian, he wrote it with some scientific accuracy which made me wonder how much science fiction is scientifically correct.