Saturdays are for sleeping in
If only my weekends were uneventful. On Saturday (June 30), I woke up to my sister demanding that I get ready to leave the house. I had anticipated sleeping in after a tough day’s work in the...
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My Fourth of July seemed top secret
“You don’t run research around your life, you run your life around research.” I learned this quote last year in the Summer Research Program, but I really didn’t feel the effects of it until last week....
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GUEST BLOG: Students are lab partners
Marc S. Mendonca, Ph.D. My name is Dr. Marc Mendonca. I am an associate professor and director of radiation and cancer biology in the departments of radiation oncology and medical genetics at Indiana...
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Steady hand, intense focus needed
In research, laboratories typically focus on two types of questions about the natural world. Scientists want to determine what is happening and how it is happening. My first few weeks in the lab dealt...
View ArticleDeveloping film
Enter a dark room. You hear a machine stir ahead of you. Flip the red light on to illuminate a small room with a bench top and an odd-looking machine. The next phase of our experiment must be performed...
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GUEST BLOG: More about Western blots
Marc S. Mendonca, Ph.D. My high school summer researcher, Amanuel Kibrom, has been blogging about learning and performing Western blots. This assay — a test or procedure — allows us to measure how...
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Summing up my research in 1,280 square inches
32 inches by 40 inches.1,280 square inches of real estate. That’s how much space you have to wow your audience. 1,280 square inches has to excite them at first glance. But most of all, that 32 by 40...
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Lunch with my mom
Now for the finale, also known as the luncheon. The day that we all look back on our eight-week journey much further along than when we started. We begin to realize that the many days spent slaving...
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GUEST BLOG: Watching my student having fun doing science
Marc S. Mendonca, Ph.D. Watching one of my summer research students go through the process of getting a talk and/or poster ready for presentation is always interesting for me and scary for them. It...
View ArticleThe Experiment to End All Experiments
My work this summer focused mainly on protein quantification for the pancreatic cancer cell line. As my previous Western Blots had not yielded very conclusive data, I made it a priority to perform a...
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