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.