Discoveries in the lab...and myself - Tiffany Hu

I can’t believe it’s almost been a month since I’ve arrived in Leuven. Time passes way too fast, and, honestly, I wish I didn’t have this “time counting down” feeling. Honestly, these past few weeks have been rough in their ways (peep at my previous blog post), but as time progresses, I feel like I’m growing in ways I couldn’t be if I were back in the States. I’m more bold? I’m more confident? I’m the happiest I’ve been in a while, and I suppose that’s a good thing. Ha. I’ve been traveling here and there. I made trips to some Belgium cities and then took a road trip to Paris with a PhD student in Leuven named Hamza! We chatted for nearly the whole time to Paris (and we talked so much that he kept missing the exits), and it was an all-around good time. I came out of Paris with a couple of new friends as well, and they took me to the riverside of the Seine to dance salsa till 4 AM.

Leuven’s becoming more and more like a second home. I’m discovering new restaurants and crannies every week, and biking is much easier now that I’ve been doing it for nearly a month. I didn’t expect to end up with a pretty big friend group of other IMEC and KU Leuven students, but I did. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a pretty reserved person who doesn’t really take the effort to socialize because, well, it’s just so tiring and it gets boring really easily. But I guess you make friends in the most unexpected ways? Thy make me feel like I belong here, and… it’s just very nice. Very nice. Everyone’s just so nice that it makes me emotional (sometimes). Grace and I have also been meeting the locals of Leuven. It’s so nice to be able to talk to the locals about life and their own life stories. Everyone we’ve met in Leuven have such interesting lives and they’re all really open about their opinions and their experiences.

I haven’t talked about my work yet. Hm. As for work, well, I do put a lot of pressure on myself, since I have a lot of responsibility with my own project, and also because I’m always trying to find new ideas. I do hope I make a difference here in the last two months or so I have here, but it’s… it’s going to be a hard journey.

Paris!

Digital Droplet PCR - Grace Hao

My current project involves digital droplet PCR, which is a lab on a chip. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a process to amplify target DNA to millions of copies through thermocycling. I’ve done PCR in the past, but it’s been so tedious and long.The entire goal of digital droplet PCR is to not only shorten the time it takes to conduct PCR, which can be hours at times, but also to amplify a limited quantity of starting DNA. This is a lab on a chip project, and I’m continuing the work of two past Johns Hopkins IMEC interns (Rachel and Polly) and a Master’s student from KU Leuven.

My project is a bit farther along, and I get to be part of the refining of the assay to optimize the process. So far, I’ve been trained on how to use the current set up left to me from previous students and how to make the optimized assay. It’s really awesome that the concepts I’ve learned in various classes like Biomaterials, Kinetics, and lab has been put to use in this project because in class it seems like theory. However, at IMEC they’re using materials science to change how we use PCR.