Week 8 — Orren Shachaf

This week, I presented on my summer immersion project at our weekly Clinical Immersion Program meeting. Listening to my peers’ presentations during this week’s and last week’s meeting was very exciting, as I knew about the projects of HSS students—everyone had a wonderful experience and did great work! On Tuesday, I shadowed a new-to-me clinician, Dr. Melanie Smith, who is both a researcher investigating immune cells in inflammatory arthritis and a rheumatologist specializing in the treatment of patients with inflammatory arthritis. Although my shadowing of Dr. Smith was limited, as she only sees patients once per week from the morning until noon, I had a wonderful experience chatting with her, as I am extremely interested in the immune system, and learning more about the symptomatic differences between inflammatory and mechanically-driven arthritis. For example, while osteoarthritis patients typically describe a morning stiffness which limits their mobility to under 30 minutes, rheumatoid arthritis patients typically describe a morning stiffness which limits their mobility to over an hour. Regarding my research project, I performed more immunohistochemistry this week, tweaking the incubation period of the DAB peroxidase substrate, which imbues the sections with their brown color; this incubation is extremely finicky and has been non-specifically staining areas of muscle; the development of this protocol has reminded me the reasons why researchers are not fond of immunohistochemistry, since there are so many points of failure making the process difficult to debug. I also imaged the slides using the ZEISS Axioscan 7 (slide scanner). Although I am going home to Ithaca this week, which I am super excited for, I am really happy with the outcomes of this summer—I will be continuing this project throughout at least the next year, which is extremely exciting, as it fit right into the project I was hoping to pursue when I joined my home lab at Cornell (the van der Meulen Lab).