I ran an individual research project studying the effects of hypoxic conditions and conditioned media on the growth and maintenance of hematopoietic stem cells. I also optimized current cell culture protocols to determine what the best conditions are to grow the cells and using flow cytometry to identify them.

I assisted with office tasks like directing students and answering their questions, aiding with phone calls, and preparing for business and companies that are coming to the university for recruiting sessions. I also ran the recruiting sessions by setting up the audio and visual systems for the recruiters, picking up food, organizing the environment, directing students as they enter, and ensuring the whole session ran smoothly for the students and recruiters involved.

In this internship, I performed a literature review collecting and condensing information from over 50 literature articles concerning the effect of sterilization on a selected class of materials. Guided by the results from my literature review, I designed a sterilization study, including packaging considerations, to determine the effects of sterilization on the materials in a controlled environment and experiment. Finally, I performed baseline testing on materials to achieve a per-sterilization control to compare post-sterilized materials to. Collectively, my work formed a materials library that will aid in the materials selection for the project I was on, and additionally save hours of research and testing time for other projects that desire to use any of the materials studied.

In this internship, I developed a novel synthesis procedure to achieve product formation in a single reaction and saved over 10 hours of synthesis time. I also verified compound formation utilizing mass spectrometry and purified compounds using preparative liquid chromatography and high performance liquid chromatography. Additionally, I synthesized peptide-RNA conjugates and tagged them with fluorophores to track their in vivo distribution via imaging, and I discovered that the synthesized conjugates allowed visualization of improved uptake into the targeted tissue.