Catia Dombaxe / Dr. Schwartz Week 8

 07/24/23 - 07/28/23

This last week is a bittersweet moment as we are coming to end one of the greatest experiences I am having in graduate school. The experiences of the past eight weeks were beyond I could have imagined and surely increased my intellectual bandwidth.

For this last week, I spent most of it working on gathering the last bit of data results for my research project. My mentor and I encountered a couple of problems with our camera system, but we were able to find a solution and fix in time to gather the calcium activity in both wild-type and mutant mice. Due to time constraints, the project will continue without me but we believe we got to a good point in the research. The project worked as a proof of concept, but in the future we need more mice with window implant to have a greater statistical power analysis.

In my clinical rotation, I worked towards delivering more data for our hydroset paper and did some more literature review on hydroxyapatite for endoscopic skull base surgery which will be used for this paper. Additionally, I shadow Dr. Schwartz on a couple of his surgeries, mostly pituitary tumor removal endoscopically through the nose.

Overall, I had an incredible experience during this clinical summer immersion. These experiences expanded my horizon and will definitely contribute to my research back in Ithaca. I am looking forward to share my experiences with my peers.



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