Student Research at Duke

My research experience this summer has been wonderful. I learned so much from my mentor, Dr. Tom Ortel and the resarch staff I was fortunate enough to work with. My research here is thankfully not coming to an end just yet, as I will be continuing this project during the the fall.

Working in a clinical lab this summer allowed me to interact with patients and conduct experiments in a lab setting. I often felt like a physician (with my hospital badge, but no white coat), explaining the study to a patient while the friendly face listened attentively. Working in the clinic was even better than shadowing a doctor. I was able to go behind the scenes and see multiple doctors and nurses at work. I learned a lot from just watching and listening, after which came a multitude of questions.  Like any other biomedical lab, my project also involved me performing assays in a wetlab environment, a task I fully enjoyed. Although pipetting and centrifuging day after day may get monotonous, I know I am inching towards the finsh line - getting results. 

This experience opened my eyes to what real science is and how exciting research can be. Real science contributes to the good of humankind, whether that be by documenting a patient’s symptoms and prescribing medication for their pain, conducting microarray analysis for genetic analysis, or cloning cells from knockout mice. Science holds within it many interesting questions to life and that we, as future scientists and doctors, can help answer. 

For a long time, I wanted to be a pediatric oncologist. Friends and family who often asked what I wanted to become were often surprised that someone so young had a specific proffession picked out. Like many children, I too had dreamed of being a doctor; One day, I stumbled upon a St. Jude’s Hospital infomercial that shared the stories of children with various types of cancer. I remember being amazed at people so young could be struck with incurable illnesses. I saw their sad eyes and bald heads and began to wonder what I could do to help. I remember going on the internet and looking up the title of doctors that treated these kind of patients: Pediatric Oncologists.

I still want to be a doctor, but because of my lab experience this summer, I ‘ve also been contemplating biomedical research. My mentor is a hematologist and a clinical researcher. Its amazing to see the practical application that his clinical trials have in medicine (ex. using genomics to develop diagnostic tools). I hope to take part more research here at Duke and will continue to contemplate my furture.

 Here are a couple pictures:

Our study got approved one week from yesterday, which was pretty exciting. I began recruiting patients from the anticoagulation clinic and was surprised at how receptive the patients were towards the study- no one that I talked to refused to participate. We were able to enroll 8 patients so far, but that still leaves 32 to go. Although this process can be painfully slow at times, I enjoy interacting with the patients. After getting all 40 samples, I will do the extractions and submit the RNA to the microarray facility. I was told that the latter step, combined with analyzing the data usually takes about 2 weeks. But, I plan to get as far as I can with the time I have. Patience, Lulit, patience.