How has your completion of the project changed how you would answer those questions?

How and why did you select this engagement? What skills or experiences do you hope to gain from it?

How does this activity connect to your concurrent or past coursework? How does it speak to your
broader education goals and experiences?

How did your project contribute to the work of the organization or your partners?

Do you see yourself continuing to work with the organization or partners, or on issues related to this
project?

What did you learn about yourself and the importance of this project over the course of the last
quarter?

Looking back, I selected this engagement for the same reason I stated prior; I did seek to
introspect on a problem that has affected me personally. However, I would say that I have gained a
greater appreciation for what it means to work on this research – I have no question every morning
about whether what I am doing matters. Working at the intersection of human health and basic science
is challenging and even frustrating at times; things are not clean and do not always work out neatly. I
would say that I genuinely did gain many of the skills I sought out to develop I am a much more capable
wet lab molecular biologist than I was when writing this proposal, and I am a far more competent and
well versed in computational skills as well. I was given the opportunity to apply complex and cutting-
edge methods in opportunities that are often unavailable to many at the undergraduate level due to the
cost and effort required. I was also given a great deal of independence in this project, which was an
incredible opportunity to understand the pace and responsibilities that come with managing your own
project. I owe this in large part to the mentorship opportunity given to me by Dr.Hawkins - his
mentorship throughout this project was also invaluable and has greatly informed my goals and
aspirations as I move forward with my career. The skills I gained from this experience also drew on past
coursework and have helped me move forward through adjusting educational and academic goals
through my last year at the UW.

This activity genuinely did help me extend my knowledge gained from coursework into an
important and complex question – there is no doubt in my mind that undertaking this activity forced me
to develop a knowledge of the methods and science underlying my work quickly and accurately.
Additionally, as I took further courses, I spent time connecting this project to what I was learning at the
time. BIOC 442 provided some foundational knowledge for this project, and I gained further knowledge
through classes like BIOL 359 (quantitative biology), GENOME 373 (genomic informatics), and found
myself using knowledge from a previous course STAT 302 (statistical software and applications). My
skills in being able to adapt past knowledge and gain new knowledge to answer questions, as well as the
ability to communicate complex information clearly and succinctly were muscles grown only through the
practice this project afforded me. The skills I gained with this project have also helped me gain
opportunities for further research elsewhere post-graduation, and I am looking forward to applying the
knowledge I gained to an eventual doctoral degree. This project also helped me grow my scientific
curiosity, as it was an area of study I had not previously had much exposure to. I now find myself far
more open to and excited by jumping into investigating questions in new biological systems, which is a
helpful mindset to have in research. Additionally, I found that I over time I began to consider the
question we were asking as an aggregation of so many people’s different painstaking effort, and it
became more meaningful in the context of the work we did in our lab.

This project was a culmination of the work of our and our partner’s lab and was also tangentially
related to previous work we did in understanding the epigenetics of neural rosettes. This project
contributed to a related project carried out by our collaborators in neurology, wherein they looked at
the expression of genes in microglia between Alzheimer’s afflicted and healthy patient samples to
understand genetic pathways and uncover large scale genomic differences. This project was an
extension of our current methodologies into a space we were not experts in but was a valuable
opportunity for a foray into the genetic basis of neurodegenerative conditions. I am hoping that my
work in establishing a wet lab procedure to answer this question will aid whoever seeks to further our
knowledge in this field. Additionally, my work in analysis of these kinds of data will also aid in
downstream work answering similar kinds of questions. I owe my early successes in this project to
guidance from Dr. Stephanie Battle, a former postdoctoral researcher in our laboratory, who established
an early version of the procedure I helped develop for this project. Her work in optimizing the early
steps of the experimental workflow was specifically helpful in informing decisions I made while
developing the procedure. Our cumulative efforts in taking this project to the stage it currently is at will
potentially be valuable for the next person taking ownership for this experiment push it to completion
and publication. My work in this project has also definitively helped me understand my interests as well
as skills I would like to develop as I move beyond the UW.

While I graduate this quarter and will no longer be working in the Hawkins Lab, I found the
project itself intriguing. I would be interested in working in similar problems, in the genetics of
neurobiological processes and neurodegenerative diseases, moving forward. This project has helped me
gain appreciation for the complexities of neurological processes, and the potential that asking questions
in this system can have for human health. I would also like to take some time in the future delving
deeper into the biology behind neurological processes and the technologies we use to investigate them
out of genuine curiosity. I am considering looking into projects in this space for graduate school and
beyond as well, as I believe work in this field is valuable and directly translational to human health and
quality of life. Additionally, this project also has an immunogenomic component as the cells of interest
are microglia, a type of immune cell in the central nervous system. This relates to some of our broader
research into the genetics of autoimmunity and is also an interest of mine as I move into a new position
studying immunogenomics post-graduation.

I would say that to summate, this project honestly taught me a lot of patience; we had several
setbacks in executing the experiments, especially throughout the pandemic. However, it also taught me
that important things cannot be rushed – there will always be setbacks, disappointments, and
frustrations inherent to science. I learned that I may not explicitly be cut out for this exact line of work,
especially when it comes to the drawbacks of working in the wet lab regularly (it became frustratingly
apparent to me that progress is highly dependent on circumstances and the state of the world).
Moreover, I learned that I genuinely enjoy working on computational projects, and I relish the
opportunity that working on this project and similar projects gave me in exploring that portion of the
work we do in the lab. Applying statistical and computational techniques to data, learning to use the
methods of problem solving inherent to those techniques, and seeing the tangible output of my work is
satisfying to me in a way I did not realize prior. The way I understood this project and its significance also
evolved over the course of the quarter, and my goals changed as I encountered challenges inherent to
investigating these kinds of questions. Working on this project has been meaningful to me in ways I
could not imagine at the outset, and I am looking forward to employing the knowledge, skills and
insights I have gained as I move forward as both an academic and a person.