Summer internship with Dr. Itay Tirosh
July 2021 - August 2021
Lab website: Itay Tirosh Lab Direct mentor: Michael Mints, Ph.D.
Questions we aim to answer
- How can we best analyze cell diversityand the complex ecosystem of human tumors to develop better cancer treatments?
What I did
- Reanalyzed a published sc-RNASeq dataset containing 15 nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients
- Studied Epstein-Barr virus expression at the single cell level to explore how it affects the composition of tumor tissue
Skills I developed
- Basics of R
- Comparison of mRNA expression between single cells
Defining moments
- While an enriching experience, since this program was held during the COVID-19 pandemic, every component was moved online. Disappointed and frustrated by the toll the pandemic had taken on my educational opportunities, I discarded computational neuroscience/bioinformatics as an interest to pursue, it wasn’t until I broadened my research experiences (see Joy and Voytek) that I realized I do find computational neuroscience fascinating from a cognitive/systems/sensory apporach
