My first few weeks as an electrical engineering intern have been incredibly educational! I don’t think I have ever learned this much in such a small amount of time. The things that I have learned have ranged from understanding how stepper motors work to interpreting the signals that control them. This summer my project is to modify the internal control circuitry of a Harvard Apparatus model 11 infusion only syringe pump. After the modifications have been made, the infusion-only syringe pump will be able to both infuse and withdraw fluids. Since my mentor’s research project involves microfluidics, the overall goal of my project with the syringe pump is to be able to push water into and pull water out of small microfluidic devices.

In addition to the research project, every week we are required to put together a brief presentation of our project’s goals, methods used to reach our goals, and other topics relating to our research project. Although I was intimidated when I found out about the presentations, now that we have been able to present our research, I find them quite helpful. Putting a research project presentation together helps one identify what it is about one’s project that one does and does not understand.

The seminars we attend have been informative and geared to help us learn more about the opportunities available after we graduate. One of the most recent seminars was to inform INSET interns about graduate school. Current UCSB graduate students hosted the seminar, and shared their journey that led them to graduate school. It was nice to hear the different reasons why these graduate students chose to attend graduate school.

The first few weeks of INSET have been great! I look forward to the weeks to come.

…but I wouldn’t know it because I spend all of my time locked away in a cave, slaving away over awkward graphical LabVIEW code.  I kinda love it.  The magical Santa Barbara weather is still there after work and on the weekends because the weather in Santa Barbara is magical at all times.  I’d like to drive up the mountain to bring donuts to the wizard that keeps it so beautiful here but he doesn’t take visitors.

That’s a picture of the user interface for the program I’ve been working on for the past three weeks.  It controls a fancy camera that measures the light spectrum of whatever you shine on it.  We’re going to use it to measure the sidebands produced by a tiny piece of semiconductor when we blast it with terahertz frequency light.  I’m told that some day in the distant future, this could make your internet go much faster.  When you’re streaming kitten videos in 7680×4320, you can think of me.

LabVIEW is an interesting language.  I’m not sure you’d even call it a language.  It’s actually pretty similar to written programming languages logically but it’s a much bigger pain to make things happen.  On the other hand, it’s significantly easier to read once it’s finished.  I didn’t know anything about LabVIEW before I got here so it was a bit of a challenge to produce a functional interface for our equipment.  This morning I basically finished it.  I’m sure there will be a bunch of bugs to fix and there are still a few interface features that I’d like to add but it does everything that it needs to do.  I am ecstatic.  It feels really amazing to go from guy-who-knows-nothing-about-anything to guy-who-made-something-that-we-use-to-make-science.

Look at all of those flat sequence structures and cringe like you know what I’m talking about.

The rest of my INSET experience has been just as great.  Everyone that I encounter, from my roommates to my research group, is wonderful to interact with.  I really enjoy working with my mentor too.  He gives me a lot of freedom but he’s always willing to help any time I have questions.  I was very anxious coming into this program and feeling clueless.  INSET is built to mitigate that cluelessness.  We have great seminars that teach us all about research.  We also have weekly practice presentations so that we’re pros by the end of the program when we have to present our research projects to a real audience.  Even though we still get tossed into this crazy new world, we have someone holding our hands and showing us the ropes from time to time.  The lab is a blast too.  There’s always something to do and everything you do is important, even if it’s in some tiny way.  The sense of accomplishment is thrilling.  I can’t imagine a better way to spend my summer.

Hello everyone,

Let me tell you about my experiences with INSET.  The first day was rather intimidating, well the first few days for that matter.  There was so much going on, including, meeting a lot of new people, going through safety training, researching my project, and just trying to grasp what I will be doing for the next eight weeks.  Honestly, my goal was to just to not break anything expensive for a couple of days and soak in as much information as possible.  I do not want you to get the impression that the first few days was bad, in fact it was quite the opposite.  Just a lot going on around me.  Yet trust me, you  learn and adapt very quickly.  It is fantastic being around people who are so passionate about what they are doing.  It really rubs off on you.  The environment around me was very positive and helpful.  My mentor was very patient with me and answered my many questions.  Now that this internship is really rolling, I really love the creativity and freedom allowed in research.   Spending time with these graduate students has really been a great source of information on how graduate school works and is helping me find my own path.   “transition to research.” 🙂  My project is very complex because it combines so many different aspects of science.   I am helping my mentor design a high density neural implant.  Which means I am making a very small spiky chip (picture down below) that can be inserted in the brain and acts like an antenna to pick up brain signals.  These brain signals can vary but the ones that we are focused on are the pulses in the motor cortex.  The plan is to pick up on thoughts and use that information to control something in the environment.  This technology is already out there like with braingate which is the video I posted with this entry, we are simply improving the design with our own modifications.  These modifications include making the device wireless and more biologically friendly.  Below are some illustrations that hopefully with make more sense.  My advice so far is to ask as many questions as possible and to know that it is perfectly fine to not know something, in fact it is expected.  Well this is my first blog post ever, so thank you for reading this.

P.S. I would like to say thank you to all the people who make this program happen.  This includes mentors, faculty advisers, and the folks in-charge of the INSET program such as Jens, Maria, and Dr. Arnold.   Thank you so much for all of the hard work, email responses, and just time and effort that you guys and girls put into this program.  It is extremely generous.

Here is the link for the Braingate project demonstration.  (It might make things more clear)

High Density Neural Implant ( This is what I make in the lab)   Below this picture is how my design fits into the larger scale project.

Photos from: http://mimetic.ece.ucsb.edu/research/

It has only been 3 weeks into this internship and I feel as if I have learned more in these 3 weeks than in any regular semester. I am working in the Systems Bioimaging Lab and my project involves increasing the axial resolution in widefield microscopy using deconvolution methods. Don’t worry, I didn’t understand it at first either and I still have trouble remembering some of the terminology. I spent the first week learning Matlab and the ins and outs of my project. I am fortunate enough to have been paired with a patient mentor that  is willing to take the time to teach me what I need to know, or even just help me refresh on old material. This is my first research experience so I didn’t really know what to expect.  I just kept in mind that everyone I am working with is just another person; that even though research is a big part of their lives, they have lives outside the lab too. The only difficult part of my internship is maintaining my excitement about the project. Most of my time is spent in front of a computer (which can get boring at times), but I just have to remind myself of the overall goal to regain my motivation. I am looking forward to the coming weeks because I will be able to work with the fancy microscope in the lab.

This summer is the best summer I have ever had. I still hardly believe that I got the offer to INSET program. At first, I was really confused about my project, and when I talked to my mentor on the first day, I was so overwhelmed with all the information. However, my mentor is really awesome; he does make all the concepts become more simpler and easier. My lab is called Interfacial Laboratory, which also belongs to Chemical Engineering Department. My project is about hydrophobic interactions. The final goal of my project is to study about the energy at the hydrophobic interface by doing contact angle measurements. Specifically, I have to prepare a hydrophobic surface on gold-coated-mica to test its interaction with water and liquid. What I am trying to do is to see that how the pH will affect hydrophobicity. My work in the lab is getting better day by day even though I have not yet got the results I want. Besides, all the members in my lab are really nice and friendly. I feel more comfortable with what I am doing now, and I know that I would get more and more great experience throughout eight weeks.