It’s been an amazing couple weeks being a part of the prestigious and interdisciplinary Brackenridge fellowship. I’ve taken many ideas and realizations from my time meeting weekly during the summer that will help me grow as a student, researcher, and person. I appreciate the work everyone put in during the fellowship and Dr. Say for organizing everything.

My research has come a long way since the beginning of the fellowship. To be honest, the work I am doing with AI disease detection is difficult and a large part of that difficulty comes from being an undergraduate and not having a PhD in the field. However, the fellowship has taught me many things that have helped me project move along. Learning about the importance of well-defined purpose and significance statements helped me a lot in narrowing the goals of my project and improving my writing. This lead to my final abstract that looked completely different from my initial tries at forming an abstract.

Interestingly, what I found most valuable about my Brackenridge experience was connecting with researchers outside STEM. I learned how hard it was for many people to get the clearances they needed to conduct interviews – something I never thought about. Also, wording and use of language in social science/humanities research is so particular and focused upon. These lessons, and more, gave me a deep respect and admiration for research in these non STEM fields. It’s not as straight forward as STEM publications, where publications are essentially step-by-step playbooks and the goals are exact and clear. In humanities research, there’s just a lot of extra thinking and nuance about how your experiment and data collection goes.

Now that the Brackenridge is over, I hope to use all the data I gathered this summer to submit a small paper for to a medical imaging publication. This would be my first every publication as primary research and primary author. I designed the experiments myself after reading through methods other researchers have done, with feedback from my PI of course. In a perfect world, I’d write up a draft manuscript, have them peer-reviewed by my PI, his colleagues, faculty and students at my lab, etc., and then sent for publication by the end of the summer. In reality, I’ll probably be doing back and forth editing/revising of my draft for the next few weeks before publication even becomes an option. This experience will definitely prepare me for my B. Phil thesis that I want to pursue in the future. Hopefully, I can stay on this train of machine learning and AI in medicine with a new project. My lab looks to go into organ transplant research in the future, which would be an amazing opportunity to present and defend a thesis on. Also, I’d love the chance to do some type of research closely related to my unique Emergency Medicine major, where I’ll be training as a paramedic. Paramedicine research involves looking at data to revise and update EMS protocols to better serve patients and the public. In all, the Brackenridge provided me with an amazing stepping stone to pursue future endeavors as a researcher.

Signing out

Jatin Singh