Blogs

Week 2 started off great with a visit from the NSF site visit team Monday.  There they gave some background on the aspects of their funding and also assessed each individual project within CMOP to see how they were going.  Each intern had the opportunity to speak with an NSF representative during lunch.  I spoke with an engineer from the University of Florida who had some insightful things to say about his studies with ocean currents and turbulence.

I thought this week was busy; site visit, Furse class, trip to OHSU, CRITFC library, DoSE library, PSU library, neighborhood library and i've also been online researching the four tribes who have fishing rights on the "big river". I also been thinking how i want the tribal portal to look and function. now I have some info and ideas, and some places to go for resources and I will meet more important people in the community from my mentor.

On Monday of this week the site visit team from the National Science Foundation, whose grant funds the CMOP research, came for a day of presentations regarding all the research going on here at CMOP.  Although it was a long day of presentations, it was great to see all the research being conducted and the technology being used in all different fields of CMOP's research. It also gave me a better idea of CMOP's overall goals as an organization.

This week was my first full week and was eventful as I learned how to work in the lab and got to take water samples in Astoria.

This week has been frustrating. My project revolves around a stretch of DNA, and determining how exactly that stretch of DNA regulates gene expression. Before we can determine that, however, we need to isolate and clone several fragments containing different lengths of the DNA in question (the B. anthracis fnr promoter region). I've been trying to isolate these fragments this week, but have run into several problems with the plasmid vectors.

Being friday I see it as a good time to sit down and type out my blog for week two. Looking back it was an extremely busy week but I have to say that it went by really fast. Most of my time was spent in the lab doing running DNA extractions and PCR amplifications. I think I am also finally starting to understand the relevance of identifying bacteria and archaea in waterways. While this is good I have also learned a lot by making mistakes in the lab in regards to the DNA extraction due to my misunderstanding instructions.

This past week was particularly exciting because my frontline mentor, another graduate student, and I went to the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB) for 2 days. OIMB is another research facility located on the coast near Coos Bay. There, we collected B.pacifica, another bryozoan that is closely related to B.neritina but is typically more difficult to work with. Also, judging from the number of publications online on B.pacifica, this bryozoan has been given less attention than B.neritina.

This week I was excited to start my work at CMOP.  However, becasuse I go to OSU I had finals exams during the first week of my CMOP internship and was only able to attend the orientation on Monday, June 8th.  This was a very helpful session to attend because I learned all about what I was going to be doing during my time here at OHSU.  I met my mentor, Suzanne DeLorenzo, and was introduced to the project I would be working on for the next ten weeks.  During orientation we also went through a lab safety training set up our emails and blogs so we

This entry is going to mainly be dedicated to our OHSU visit because as my mentor has been out of town, I have mainly been reading and helping enter data into the computer.

Unfortunately, like Tyler, I  missed almost all of the first week due to finals at Oregon State University. On top of that I was unable to get my blog set up until today so I am just now posting my week one entry today.