During my PURM fellowship, I worked in the Center of Neuroengineering and Therapeutics (CNT) which is a lab at the intersection of medicine and engineering. I was excited to work here as it allowed me to keep my career path open while exploring my academic interest in neuroscience. Despite having no coding experience whatsoever , I was chosen for a position that was mainly software based. My mentor Dr. Brian Litt was completely ok with this and encouraged me to pick up this new skill. The entire lab community was extremely supportive and answered any and all questions without judgment, especially Brittany and John. By the end of the project, I had a lot of experience with MATLAB and earned the Stanford Machine learning certificate. Through that certificate I got to work on a lot of fun projects like movie recommendation systems, unsupervised learning programs, anomaly detection, and neural networks for hand writing recognition. I also learned a lot about physiology of epilepsy, varying treatment, EEG signal processing and data analytics.
After becoming more familiar with coding, I worked on a mini-project with the Jensen lab where I did statistical and spectral analysis of the EEG readings they collected on mice in order to test the effectiveness of neurodegenerative disease treatments. Aside from the academic development, working in my lab has allowed me to develop my teamwork skills, gain experience working in a professional environment, collaborating with external organizations and attending various meetings.
While I didn’t achieve my goal of deciding on my career path, I will be very equipped for whatever path I choose due to the skills I acquired this summer. It was truly an unforgettable experience as I feel like I found a home away from home and I am excited to continue working in my lab during the semester!
During my PURM fellowship, I worked in the Center of Neuroengineering and Therapeutics (CNT) which is a lab at the intersection of medicine and engineering. I was excited to work here as it allowed me to keep my career path open while exploring my academic interest in neuroscience. Despite having no coding experience whatsoever , I was chosen for a position that was mainly software based. My mentor Dr. Brian Litt was completely ok with this and encouraged me to pick up this new skill. The entire lab community was extremely supportive and answered any and all questions without judgment, especially Brittany and John. By the end of the project, I had a lot of experience with MATLAB and earned the Stanford Machine learning certificate. Through that certificate I got to work on a lot of fun projects like movie recommendation systems, unsupervised learning programs, anomaly detection, and neural networks for hand writing recognition. I also learned a lot about physiology of epilepsy, varying treatment, EEG signal processing and data analytics.
After becoming more familiar with coding, I worked on a mini-project with the Jensen lab where I did statistical and spectral analysis of the EEG readings they collected on mice in order to test the effectiveness of neurodegenerative disease treatments. Aside from the academic development, working in my lab has allowed me to develop my teamwork skills, gain experience working in a professional environment, collaborating with external organizations and attending various meetings.
While I didn’t achieve my goal of deciding on my career path, I will be very equipped for whatever path I choose due to the skills I acquired this summer. It was truly an unforgettable experience as I feel like I found a home away from home and I am excited to continue working in my lab during the semester!