Hi everyone! Welcome to my last blog about my amazing experience working as a Pinhead intern. This week I wrapped up my internship with UC Davis, where we learned different methods of computational drug design from 3 different professors. Me and the other interns got to work with Haibo Ni, and were taught some techniques using Python and graphing. The week started with introductions and a powerpoint lesson on cardiac arrhythmias. Arrhythmias are one of the biggest issues when it comes to the creation of new pharmaceuticals, as they can be extremely dangerous. All drugs that are designed must be tested for their interactions with the heart before entering clinical trials. Later on in the week, we got to do equations that were computationally converted into graphs. We altered the amount potassium and sodium inside and outside of a cell and observed the changes it made to the energy outputs. These energy outputs can affect the heart. This was super interesting to learn about and felt like a really hands on experience. We were able to learn about how minuscule changes in things such as potassium and sodium can cause major, potentially life threatening, changes in the heart. Unfortunately, I took a trip to Denver and had to miss out on one meeting this week.
On our last day, we had a really good conversation about the internship. Our mentors were able to offer us lots of good advice on how we can take the information we used and apply it to our futures. We were able to tell them all of the things we enjoyed and things we would change about the internship. The only thing me and the other intern wanted was to make the internship longer. I am so thankful that I had this opportunity to learn from such amazing mentors. A special thank you goes out to Sarah Holbrooke and the rest on the Pinhead team for providing me and many other students with amazing opportunities to learn and experience such amazing things. I didn’t manage to get any pictures this week as we were mostly working with powerpoint and graphs, so sorry about that! But, thanks for reading! And make sure to check out the other interns blogs!!
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