Hi everyone! My name is Naiya Patel and I am a rising sophomore in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. I am on the pre-med track majoring in neuroscience and minoring in Economics and Chemistry. As the summer comes to a close, so does my Brackenridge fellowship, which I am honored to have been a part of. Many things went great, and I certainly learned a lot! However, there were many delays and issues that arose along the way.

This summer, I conducted research at the Catov Lab at Magee-Womens Research Institute with Dr. Gandley. As a little summary, the Catov Lab closely examines the health of women with preeclampsia, focusing both on cardiovascular health as well as cognitive health. Preeclampsia is essentially hypertension during pregnancy. Specifically, the Window Brain Study, an ongoing research study at the Catov Lab, is focusing on different aspects of cognitive decline for midlife women with and without preeclampsia. My hypothesis was that African American women would have elevated levels of biomarkers pertaining to neuroinflammation (often a precursor for Alzheimer’s Disease and cognitive decline later in life) already at midlife compared to white women and that preeclampsia would adversely impact the biomarker levels. 

Initially, for my project, we were going to select 40 total plasma samples of women who gave birth at Magee-Women’s Hospital 15 years ago. Thus, we collected those 40 samples and were on our way to begin assays to test for biomarker concentrations. However, we decided later on that we could include all of the women in the Window Brain Study who had plasma samples due to our ability to order more assay kits. Thus, this created a huge delay in the timing of my project as we had to analyze and pull 104 more samples in addition to the initial 40 samples. Currently, we are almost done with running all five of the assays, testing for 37 neuroinflammation biomarkers, and have started data analysis. 

Despite all of the delays, I feel that I learned a lot about research in the real world. In our normal chemistry and biology labs, we often have a set list of instructions to follow to produce an outcome that we all expect as we are replicating experiments with known results. As long as we properly follow the steps, we should get similar results. However, through this fellowship this summer, I was able to learn that real-life research is incredibly different, as we may need to modify those instructions even half-way into the experiment to obtain data specific to one’s project. 

Throughout this fellowship, I felt like I encountered a very steep learning curve, as I had to understand how biomarker assays worked, how to interpret standard curve graphs, how to utilize the Meso Scale Diagnostics software (which has little to no user accessibility), and more. I sometimes found myself asking dumb questions, or at least questions that I thought were dumb, but then learning so much from them. I found this learning to be incredibly valuable to me. 

I have immersed myself into this work all summer and ended up loving it! Thus, for the future, even after this fellowship, I would like to continue researching at the Catov Lab and hopefully turn this into my BPhil project!