Jessie Castro Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Illinois, United States

As a Pre-Doctoral Teaching Fellow (PdTF), I am responsible for various pieces of the 1st and 2nd year students education on Osteopathic Manipulation Therapy (OMT). I give about 4-7 lectures per semester; this includes a classic Powerpoint lecture, but we also do demonstrations during the lecture (guided demo and/or a "show and go" - demonstrate technique and then let them work on it in pairs). Our primary objective is to teach, but we have many other jobs to do: maintaining our OMT lab/tables/equipment, organizing the 2nd year TA's, facilitating several problem based/case based learning small groups, performing effectively OMT on our fellow students and faculty, writing and vetting test questions, etc. The core of the Fellowship at Western is collaboration and teamwork; I have been working with the other PdTF's on all of the aforementioned responsibilities plus more.

Lebanon, Oregon

As a medical student I was responsible for learning a huge amount of information in a short time in the first 2 years via lectures and workshops, and subsequently applying the knowledge in a clinical setting for the remainder of my time. As an Osteopathic student, I was also tasked with learning OMT (see the Pre-Doctoral Teaching Fellow section for more detail).

Corvallis, Oregon Area

I worked primarily at a toxicology/microbiology lab investigating the use of soil microbes as a probiotic for ruminants eating tall fescue in order to degrade endotoxins, namely ergovaline. I was responsible for much of the bench work and data analysis/synthesis. These duties included collecting the soil samples, creating the stock/agar and culturing the microbes, maintaining the cultures during investigation, plating the samples on agar, preparing 96 well plates and transferring the samples to vials for HPLC analysis, running/collecting/analyzing/and entering data from the HPLC, and preparing/running the samples through PCR to identify them using the NCBI BLAST program.I was also part of a toxicology lab investigating the effects of water samples collected around Oregon on Zebra fish embryos. In this lab I was responsible for de-chorionating (removed the outer shell) Zebra fish eggs, transferring the eggs via pipette to 96 well plates, recording observational data from 24 hrs and 5 days post exposure (movement using a light box and gross deformity via dissecting scope), and disposing of the samples. I was also trained on using an automated plating machine.

Osteopathic Medicine/Osteopathy

I was able to explore the anatomy thanks to a gracious donor-patient, learned my base medical knowledge from an inter-campus interaction.

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Microbiology, General

I was in a Microbiology program at OSU with a minor in chemistry. My time in college was mainly spent working towards medical school.