Week 2 - Katie Hudson

This week I began to focus more on my projects as Dr. Hartl was out of town for the majority of the week and my college, Peter Grunert, was more available.

On Monday I began working on my IRB. IRB stands for Internal Review Board and we must get permission from Weill Cornell’s review board before starting any experiments on humans. During fusion surgeries, Dr. Hartl often takes bone marrow to encourage the fusion of the two vertebrae. The extra marrow is usually discarded after the surgery. We would like to take this extra bone marrow and use it to create mesenchymal stem cells lines than we can use in our tissue engineering research. Taking this bone marrow, which is classified as surgical waste, requires IRB approval. Next Monday the new electronic system comes online, and I will submit it then.

Also on Monday, I read and edited a paper that Peter was writing in collaboration with my lab in Ithaca. This gave me a better idea of the experiments that were done prior to my arrival at Cornell and where we can go from here.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I worked on collecting papers for a review that Peter and Dr. Hartl would like to write on the different methods used to treat disc degeneration, including the potential of tissue engineering. Reading articles in order to write a review is one of the best ways to get acquainted with the literature in a certain area.

On Thursday, we all attended our weekly summer immersion meeting where we were introduced to Dr. Frayer. Dr. Frayer is an Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medical College and Associate Attending Pediatrician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and works closely with our summer immersion program. He suggested that we go on rounds in different areas and I expressed my interest in the NICU because it is so different from my field but it something I heard a great deal about while I was growing up.

On Friday Peter and I talked about different ways to represent his data in the paper I reviewed and what I should do while he is gone. He will be in Tanzania for 2 weeks as a part of a team teaching Tanzanian doctors about different spinal surgery techniques.