Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
(music)
Hi, my name is Anley Tefera but everybody calls me and I'm
best known by T so you can call me T and I'm here as a graduate student
in the McCoskey lab in the bioengineering and small-scale technologies program.
Hi, my name is Andrea Cho
and I am representing as an Anchor Cat representative
from the Students First Center so I'll just be interviewing you
asking you questions. So, T,
how would you explain the broader significance of your research to an
educated person?
The broader significance of my project?
Well first of all, this lab in general is a petition engineering lab. The work we do is
not limited to but it's the development design
in maintenance of tissue products that can be used to repair
restore
or mend tissues
that need those interventions, so that's the lab in general
and my project I'm designing a device
that will potentially be used to
preserve the tissue, the cardiac tissue
and we can use that as a model to study some
of the mending processes per say. That's amazing, would you say that that is
the big picture of your research?
The big picture is right now we have a problem. One of
the biggest problems in the world is a lot of people are dying from heart diseases.
It's the number one cause of death and there's a lot of interventions right now
people take, you know, pharmacological interventions like beta
blockers
and ace inhibitors and things like that or they get surgery
and get pacemakers installed and
stuff like that, or you know, they put stuff in their mechanical stuff to help
diseases and
those things those things are not helping
the problem of cardiac death
as we know in our body the heart is the mean pump that circulates blood in our body
to provide oxygen and nutrients to the rest of the body
so when that main pump is not working because
of a damaged portion of the working cells
those intervenes that I just mentioned those
are not really restoring the function. They're not really helping to restore it
so this project as a whole
finding ways to repair those
damaged cells or restore their function
is very impactful because like I said heart disease is the number one killer in the world
right now
so the broader impact is to mend a broken heart literally put.
So the next question. How should an undergraduate student reach out to professors
in order to gain research experience in their respective fields?
Well, if you ask me, my first advice to undergraduates is
to excel in their academic courses
in class and that way they've done the first part of being noticed
so professes noticed those students that are
trying, put in effort to excel in their classes
and once you've done that also go look at the website a lot of
faculty on campus have websites and stuff so go
look at the website and look at the work that the professors do
and then look at the interests that you have and if they matches the interests that
the professors have in their website, once you have that
a lot of students tend to email the professors
I suggest go in person. Professors are very friendly.
Go in person and talk to them. Tell them your interest and see if they can match you
with a project in the lab.
Awesome. On average, how many hours per week should students expect to allocate to
volunteering
in a research lab? Should and do
is two different answers. So first one, some students stay
longer hours. Some students have seen, you're talking under undergrad students?
Yes. So some students staying long long hours
per week but on average six to nine is
I'd feel like the good time to be here in lab per week to get something significant
out of your
research while you are not slacking with her school work or other business that
might have outside of the lab
so we have undergrad students that spend six to nine weeks
like I said, this is an average. Some people do less some people do more,
but six to eight hours you'll be able to produce something
able to learning something in the lab able to build your
research techniques that way by spending
enough amount of time without taking yourself away from putting that you
supposed to do.
Right. Yes so you can continue doing research.
So, what are the types of research complications that your department has
faced and how did you overcome it?
Well I wouldn't speak for the whole department, but for this lab, for example, McCoskey Lab
problems range from little mechanical problems to
science problems to a lot of other problems.
One of the problems we recently faced is one of our microscopes
wouldn't recognize
each other. It wasn't talking with our computer so we took this
image and then we
look at them in the computing we kinda
study the morphology, look at things like, you know, the cells that we're
working with
and didn't work and one of the things one of the students in our lab what they
did was
instead of using the computer they started another virtual computer
in the computer in somehow that was able to connect each other so that's that
technical part that I'm talking about.
When it comes to research when you do your
experiments usually it's not all the time all would
you're gonna do A, you're gonna do B, you're gonna do C, and you expect D.
That's an ideal world great thing to do but sometimes
you do A you do B you do C and you don't get D
and you don't even know what you got. Sometimes you need to go back
so we try to be creative with our solutions
but
i can give you a lot of examples that in general generally speaking
research is, you know, critically
thinking but has
some amount of trial and error also going at it
so critical trial and error
educated trial and error. I don't know how you want to say it.
That's fine. So through the experience of working with UC Merced students,
what has been the most memorable moment in your study?
Most memorable?
I'm a people's person
so for me each and every moment that I spent here
with student's is memorable, either as a TA
or just helping undergrad students, mentoring them while they're going through
their
grad student application process or they're stressed because class and
they need to talk
so you know, we go to lunch
and of course
in research when you
work with the students and they get those "Ah Hah!" moments, those things are really nice
but outside research, for me, I participated in sports on campus
in championship soccer we probably for the last five seasons
our team mostly graduate students would be winning
the championship some things that are like memorable moment outside
of school
and we also participate in a lot of extracurricular
activities with organizations like a
national society of black engineers or African Student Union or
or different things like that that way I get to interact
with, you know, the the student community
also other activities that I get to interact with the community
so my stay in the lab is not just the lab and the
research but also my stay in Merced in the community
how I can be and enter part of the community
in large the Merced community, the community at UC Merced
and then we have another community here in the lab so I enjoy every moment
so I cant give you one that just stands out.
So, talking about all the stuff that you've done with UC Merced
and the students and the community what
keeps you going? What keeps you stay
focused onto the research and all the other clubs that you've
been committed in? How do you keep going with that?
Research wise, I'm very
fascinated with what cells can do
research wise, our lab is actually a part of a program called EECS
thats collaborates with MIT, Georgia Tech,
Illinois, City College New York
A lot of schools and the idea is to
create living multi cellular machine
that consoles real-world problems and just being part of something like that is
for me, research wise, and I can't even start
to talk about cells because I'm so fascinated
and that machinery how it works and the things that they do, so
I'm not even gonna go there and when it comes to
the making a difference in the community, that really
you know gets me going just seeing
making changes in people's life. Having
seen people be happy and also there is some recognition
that I don't expect but I have
been fortunate enough to get some recognition from the city from
the State Assembly in things like that in the or from the students here on campus
so those are like icing on the cake and they're not requirements
but they're also nice to get those things but the main thing is
seeing how other people are happy. I don't know if you can tell by now that I'm a happy person.
and I like to be happy
and I like to make people happy
so life-wise, that's what keeps me going
and research wise, like I said, I'm
very fascinated and I wanna be a faculty member one day
working on cutting edge research and working with the students and teaching at the same time
so that future keeps me going today.
Alright, thank you so much for your time, T.
No problem. It's my pleasure and anytime you guys wanna come and chat
(music)