Week 7: Orren Shachaf

This week, I had the opportunity to observe Dr. Mathias Bostrom perform a total knee replacement, which was completed in under an hour! I am not familiar with the timing of open surgery outside of the open shoulder surgeries I have observed with Dr. Laura Moore—which take about three hours—but this seemed extremely fast. Additionally, I observed both open and arthroscopic shoulder surgeries with Dr. Laura Moore operating. Most of my week was taken up with immunohistochemistry—including the multi-day process of staining histological samples and imaging the resulting slides with the ZEISS Axioscan 7 (slide scanner). Because Dr. Moore’s lab is relatively new, the majority of my research work this summer has focused on optimizing an immunohistochemistry protocol—taken from my home lab at Cornell—for use with uPAR (a marker of senescence). While the staining has been successful in that there is definitely positive staining present, there is some non-specific binding occurring, which is a typical occurrence for DAB peroxidase (the colored aspect of this particular staining process), so this week has been focused on finding the correct incubation period for this specific step of the staining protocol. Lastly, I have been working on my final presentation for the immersion term, since I will be presenting next week—I’m excited for the program to come to a close, since I miss Ithaca, but I’ll definitely be sad to leave NYC and HSS.