Catia Dombaxe / Dr. Schwartz Week 6

 07/10/23 -  07/14/23

This week has been the most impactful week during my summer immersion experience.

I started the week by doing more surgeries in mice and attempting to implant more window. Unfortunately, not all of my surgeries did not go as expected; however, I was able to learn from my failure and starting to get better doing the craniotomies. Then during clinic hours, I had the honour to see many patients whose brain tumors were removed years ago and there is no case of remission or reoccurrence. It was amazing to see the happiness and satisfaction on their faces.

During the hospital rounds with Dr. Schwartz, I got the privilege to see and interact with some of his patients. It was incredible to see one of the patients who had had a procedure done a day before and only after one day post-op, the patient looks extremely well and felt ready to go back home.

For the rest of the week, I was able to practice more on my surgical skills and got a perfect craniotomy and window implant on two mice. I used one of the mouse to start the calcium free behaviour recordings and I obtained some preliminary data to look at brain functional connectivity. Next week, I will continue with the recoding sessions and obtain more data for further processing. 

Another great experience, I had this week was visiting the neuroradiology reading room and I believe that that was one of the most valuable experiences I had in this program. I spent the day shadowing Dr. Andrew Schweitzer, who was incredible mentor. During my experience in the radiology reading, I learnt a great deal of the impressive collaborative work between surgeons and the radiologist, I correlated my own research to many of the cases Dr. Schweitzer and the residents were reading, and it was a great interaction with the residents and the medical students who were shadowing as well.

In addition to having the greatest experience in the reading room. I joined a career seminar for the master´s students in the Biomedical Imaging Master's Program. I contributed in the discussion by sharing my life experiences and how my Ph.D. journey at Cornell has been super impactful. It was gratifying to speak with such outstanding students.

Mice with the mScope camera attached during recording session
Mice with window implant







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