Ana Witkowski/ Dr. Bostrom

 

This week was spent mostly meeting with collaborators and finalizing details of my research projects. Monday I finally got approved to work in the mouse facility, after 3 weeks of waiting! I am excited to get started next week working with mice on the digigait with members of the Rodeo/Bostrom labs. My IRB just needed one last tweak this week, so I yet again am hopeful that it will actually be approved soon!

I also met with a couple people interested in collaborations with the projects I am currently working on back in Ithaca and here. I met Dr. Lane for the first time, got an insight into what he does and also where his research interests lie. He was very interested in the next step of what I am currently working on with my IRB (pending approval). His patients are the demographic I am most interested in, and the majority of them have consented to give their information to a bone data registry, so we talked about expanding the registry to include not just bone data, but cartilage and pain data as well. This would make studies around osteoporosis and osteoarthritis much easier to work on within our campus collaborations. 

I also met with a surgical resident, Dr. Retzky, to discuss potentially combining and comparing some of the data our labs have. Our labs have different models of post traumatic osteoarthritis, but are looking at similar immune responses, so we discussed the potential for comparing our models and the immune response in each. Post Traumatic OA varies depending on the type of injury, and is notably different in disease course (begins much earlier) than aging related OA – so comparing our models would be a great way to further emphasize how important each one is.

I spent the last two days of this week at a grant writing workshop put on by the CTSC through Weill Cornell. I have been writing grants with my PI for the duration of graduate school, but this workshop was very enlightening into the actual process of starting a grant from scratch, what to focus on and especially why to focus on each part. It was pretty specific to the NIH, but still gained a lot of knowledge around grant writing!


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