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I'm Ben Fastow, I work for Ben Chen's Lab here at UC Santa Cruz. We study mammalian
neocortical development and olfactory bulb development, and I'm a fourth year student,
so senior here at UCSC undergrad and I'm a neuroscience major. So the specific transcription
factors we study, a lot of them have to do with either Alzheimers development, mental
retardation, miscarriage as well as other disorders such as autism now we're finding
out and you know, it branches out so the more we learn about the transcription factors we
study now, we learn there's other transcription factors that are becoming novel. It kind of
progresses every year we find out more stuff. Everyone has their own opinions on cortical
development so, more so than arguing with other labs around the world, it's creating
this cohesive model of what we truly as a scientific community understand about the
developing brain. I was born in Israel and then around the ages of five and six, I moved
to America and grew up in northern California. Both my parents were PhD's but they're both
engineers not science related, and then I cam into Santa Cruz starting as a bio engineering
degree and I kind of did the science classes. You have to first before you go into the circuitry
of the engineering part and I just really liked the science. Then engineering wasn't
for me, so I switched to neuroscience. Ben Chen had an opening one summer while I was
doing school so I joined her lab and she took me in and pretty much started working pretty
much second year, end of my second year in college. I really like you know, the wet work,
the in lab activities. I feel like I learn a lot more reading papers that are coming
out that are related to our research, arguing against our research or for our research.
I learn more in my lab I can say that I learned more in a majority of my classes in Santa
Cruz. That's not because I'm like a bad student but because like, when you're applying the
material it makes a lot more sense so I learn you know, more about development of your brain
from these stem cells into the developing you know cortex that I did in any neuro class
I've taken so far. I come in and in the morning I check all the work that we did yesterday,
go over everything we did. Next I go and work with different staining, different section
we need to stain, figure out kind of what we need to progress the project and then I'll
go on and take more pictures. Analyze the pictures that I just took on a microscope
and then go on tomorrow and based on those pictures and what we have, pretty much grab
the new data, the new sections, restain those which takes a couple of days and then go on
and repeat that process. So I would say you know, are you talking to all your lab mates
on a day to day basis, I'm in constant contact with everyone. On top of that, we all have
separate projects but we work together cohesively and our projects come in line into main goals
a lot of times. So I'm constantly helping other mentors and undergrads. In a lab or
in different research experiences, you're gonna get that the different side of learning
that not many people have the opportunity to get. So I would definitely advise trying
to get into a lab and doing wet work as much as you can in college.