I am particularly interested in scientific discovery. I have enjoyed practical things and playing with stuff ever since I was a small child. I have 5 other cousins and all are older  boys. Over the summer vacation my dad used to have a science competition. Every night we had to present something we created and the best idea or project would get prize money. I experimented with magnets, surface tension and other tricks. I almost always won the first prize which the boys thought was unfair. But I enjoyed it so much that I would work all day on it while the boys played with their guns and other video games. 

In middle school, I enrolled in summer DNA camp at Cold Spring Harbor (CSH) Labs almost every year, which I enjoyed a lot. This year, I started to work at the Mitra lab. The Mitra lab is interested in mapping the brain architecture to understand how it is physically wired. They are also interested in understanding how humans think. Several labs at CSH and elsewhere are also trying to understand the inner workings of our brain. One day this may allow us to build better computers and artificial intelligent systems. My project is trying to compare and contrast biological systems to physical systems. Any living organism such as the bacteria, animals, plants and even us can be compared to a machine such as a bicycle, car or a rocket. How are they similar and how are they different? What makes something living? What makes humans better biological machines than other living beings? Understanding this will help us design new studies to help answer questions such as "What are we born with and what do we learn after birth" "Are common sense and some behaviors hard wired into our DNA"? My interest in this was also sparked after reading "Sapiens" and "Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari.