Thank You And Farewell!

Our 2019 IRES interns now head home after 10-weeks of intensive research and cultural immersion at imec in Leuven, Belgium. 

From left to right in top photo: Sharada Narayanan, Thomas DiSorbo, Hannah Christina Aspinwall, Kirby Leo, and Elmer Zapata-Mercado

Thank you for following our students' journey!

This is Heart-ly the End - Kirby Leo

I was excited to put together my work for my final presentation on developing an in vitro cardiotoxicity assay for Life Science Technologies. I had a lot of data that I wanted to present, but due to the time constraint, I had to be selective with which figures I could show to represent my efforts this summer. It was a tough, but worthwhile struggle to condense nine weeks of work into 15 minutes. I received a lot of thoughtful questions at the end of my presentation about some of my details and trends that made me realize how I could even further clarify and build upon my results. If I could stay longer, there would be many experiments I’d like to pursue, some of which involve moving to our final chip system for a higher throughput and working with our final representative cell model. These will be tasks for my supervisor or a future student. I am spending my last week cleaning up my data, performing some last experiments, and presenting my full results to my own team.

Christina, Sharada, and I
assembled formation
on our logs in the park.

Undoubtedly, I had expected my experience in Belgium to be memorable, but nothing had prepared me for the real thing. On the work side, I surprisingly found myself jumping right in my project despite my topic being slightly out of my normal scope, and I also practiced applying unfamiliar engineering techniques. However, what defined my experience most were my coworkers from Cell and Tissue Technologies. They were incredibly inspiring from not only their style of research process, but way of living and collaborating. I took this opportunity in Europe to step out of my normally more closed-off nature to involve myself in the culture and make lasting friends. As a person, I found myself maturing and developing a more realistic view of what it’s like to have a career in science beyond pure academia. Though my life goals of pursuing a career in research and medicine haven’t changed, I believe my experience here has affected how I perceive my path forwards. I feel incredibly grateful to the people I met here and am looking forward to traveling back to reconnect in the future.

Staying in Belgium for the past couple weeks has been rewarding. Christina, Sharada, and I had a self-care day of steam rooms, saunas, and musical pools in a Belgian spa in Spa, Belgium. The other days were spent hanging in Leuven with members from my imec team via barbecues and chill house events. With the interns and locals, I walked through a blotevoetenpad (barefoot path) in Zutendaal and had some good eats at Hapje Tapje, a Leuven city event, on our last Sunday here.

The clear stream water

at the end of the blotevoetenpad

 felt incredible after

climbing over so many rocks.

Everything Comes to an End, Sadly - Elmer Zapata-Mercado

Hallo, nog een laatste keer (Hello, one last time)

Well, this is it. My internship has come to an end, sadly. For the past 10 weeks I had the privilege to come to Belgium and do research far from home. If you have been keeping up with my previous entries, you will know I was working on developing techniques on how to deliver biological samples to a chip. This chip is intended to miniaturize a bulky and expensive microscope, for a mass-producible chip containing all the photonic components necessary for super-resolution imaging. Under the mentorship of Dr. Niels Verellen, I was able to expand my knowledge in on-a-chip microscopy. Over the course of the summer I was able to achieve almost the entirety of the three goals I had. I was able to select a cell structure and a suitable dye for labeling the mentioned structure (1), and I was able to develop protocols to deliver such samples into our chip (2). My third and final goal is almost achieved, to demonstrate super-resolution imaging of the biological sample on the chip. Sadly, I will be leaving before this is achieved, maybe one or two more weeks would’ve sufficed to meet this goal. Overall, I was able to develop methodologies that will help my team here at imec move the field of photonics a little further.

After this magnificent 10 weeks, I have to say I am more than grateful to all the agencies and institutions involved: imec, the Institute of NanoBioTechnology (INBT) at Johns Hopkins University, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the European Research Council (ERC), and my awesome PhD advisor for allowing me to expand my academic and professional horizons. If the opportunity comes in the future, I will consider coming back to imec to continue to do some good science “across the pond”. Having experienced the differences in research culture and society, makes me consider a professional career outside the United States. Experiences like this one, I feel, are necessary to create bridges instead of walls.

Christina, Kirby, Sharada, and me during our barefoot walk.

Lastly, it is not my blog if I don’t tell you very quickly what I did over the past two weekends. I was able to visit one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Budapest. All my life I saw postcard-like pictures, but I have to say, the architecture and how vibrant the city is, can’t be described. I was also able to visit Amsterdam over Pride weekend, it was phenomenal how the government encouraged citizen participation. My last adventure consisted of a barefoot walk through the woods in a national park of Belgium. At the end, it makes you appreciate your shoes.

With this I leave all of you, I hope you enjoyed reading about my adventures as much as I did living each and every single one of these experiences.

Tot ziens! (Farewell!)

Hungarian Parliament (in Pest) as seen from the Buda side across the Danube.

Leaving Leuven - Hannah Christina Aspinwell

That’s a wrap! With my final presentation over and my exit forms signed, my time at imec has come to an end. Ten weeks sounds like a long time, but it went by in a blink. I didn’t even get through the bottle of dish soap I bought on day one!

I was really impressed by the IRES cohort’s presentations and the great deal of thought and care they poured into their projects. Their work was fascinating and fun to see the context behind what they've been talking about all summer. It’s also clear that they have strong ideas about how they’d continue their project if they had more time.

Last week was a flurry of activity with plenty of data to analyze and slides to make. As is often the case with preparing final presentations, it reveals how much I accomplished and learned, even though there were times I felt my work could have moved faster. My latest results indicate our polymer composition will be suitable for 3D-printing microfluidics if the leeching stop can be optimized. Next year a master’s student will inherit this project and while it’s disappointing that I won’t see the research move forward, I am recording my thoughts and recommendations, such as the chemistries involved in later printing and molding steps, so that future work will be as fruitful as possible.

The experience has taught me to trust myself as a researcher. My time at Hopkins has prepared me well to address many issues and taught me where to look for information when I’m unsure how to proceed. I’m more confident now in my intuition about how to solve unexpected problems.

Me drinking from and petting a duck fountain in Leuven.

This is supposed give you good luckfor coming back to Leuven.

I respect the scientist and engineers at imec tremendously. Not only were they helpful and welcoming, they suggested new avenues of testing that I would not have thought about otherwise. Part of this is their experience in the field, but I also feel that their approach is slightly different, and complementary, to mine because of the way science is taught and practiced here. When Luke, INBT’s Director of Corporate Partnerships who helps facilitate the IRES program, came to visit us, he mentioned that imec management said that Hopkins’ interns always find something unexpected and interesting in their project because of their different perspective. I guess that means the feeling is mutual.

My time here has been wonderful and I am fortunate to have had this experience. I even got to top it off by going for a barefoot walk at Lieteberg with some new Belgian friends and attending a truly delicious food festival here in Leuven this weekend. I want to thank everyone who helps make this program possible and imec for having me. It’s an unforgettable experience, I couldn't be happier with my time here.

Tot ziens!

Posing along the barefoot path in Belgium's Hoge Kempen National Park with the other IRES interns and new Belgian friends.

Tot ziens Leuven, en bedankt! (Goodbye Leuven, and thank you !) - Sharada Narayanan

To conclude our summer internship, we all gave our final presentations on Friday. I was able to describe the importance of my work, the development of my chip injection and sample preparation protocol, and recommend an optimal interpillar distance for the chip design. I also discussed my latest experiments testing chip cavity coatings, but those results were less conclusive. I really wish I had more time to properly study and improve the adherence and longevity of the different chip coatings I was working with. I’m planning on running one more experiment that might clear some things up, but I think the best thing I’ve done with regards to the coating optimization is to leave this research on a good trajectory for someone else to pick up after I leave.

Legend has it that if you drink the water
from the duck fountain and
stroke its back, you’ll return to Leuven

At imec, the subject of politics emerges often during our daily coffee breaks with the interns and our Belgian colleagues. It’s an interesting position to be in another country trying to explain the political climate in the United States and learn about the conversations and issues dominating Belgium and the EU. Globalization is an interesting phenomenon because it brings us together, reminding each other of our shared humanity, but it also highlights the extraordinary benefits of the collaboration of different perspectives and approaches to problem-solving. Despite the never-ending political animosities and wars that dominate the news, it’s heartwarming to see the continued collaborations between scientists and engineers across the globe. Science, perhaps more than anything else, must be able to transcend these arbitrary boundaries because the challenges we are facing are too large and existential to fight divided.

What’s been personally rewarding about my first experience working abroad is that I feel like the world has opened up to me. Before this program, I never considered the possibility of working outside the US after I graduate. But at imec, I met so many people from all over the world and I never felt lost, unwelcome, or inferior for being an outsider. I am definitely going to do some research into job opportunities abroad when I return to Hopkins and I am excited to see what the future holds for me.

In the sprit of cultural unity, this weekend us interns and some local friends spent an afternoon at the Hoge Kempen National Park and had one last night of fun with the Belgians at a food festival in the center of Leuven, sampling street food from cuisines all over the world. Since I arrived more than two months ago, I have been so grateful that this internship program placed us in Leuven; a small, vibrant college town surrounded by farmland, and I will remember this summer and this city forever.

The interns and Luke, INBT's Director of Corporate Partnerships who helps facilitate the IRES internship program, meeting up for dinner after our final
presentations.