February 5, 2019
The bus that takes us from East Campus to Main every day is known as the Stampede. It shortens the 25 minute walk between the two campuses to a 5 minute ride. Waiting for the bus can be torturous as it comes every 15 minutes or so, which is just enough time to feel antsy about doing work. Some of us opt to bike between campuses to be more time efficient. Some of us decide to walk and take the opportunity to breathe the fresh air and feel the sunshine. But most of us ride the Stampede back and forth every day. Many of us have also caught the usual winter season flu/cold, taking turns sending class notes to one another. I think most of us are a little shocked that we are half way through our 3rd rotation. Soon, we'll be divided into small groups for the Team Rotations, one of which will require immunizations! I am continually impressed by the excitement and passion of the BioFrontiers faculty who work with us. It's like IQ gives them an excuse to be creative, while giving us incredible opportunities to learn and grow. At Idea Exchange this week we learned about automating medical care. More specifically we talked about Type I diabetes and the possibility of automating and personalizing insulin delivery. The idea is to create Smart insulin pumps that would be GPS capable with voice recognition and would require little to no user control over insulin delivery. This type of automation and personalization could be used in many other medical scenarios including pace makers and anesthesia. For Dr. Peleg's class last week, we discussed the strategies ants use for transporting food back to their homes. We then read about robot design and using the ant strategy for the robot movement algorithms. Now flip forward to this week and our readings focus on developmental biology and global-to-local programming. I feel pretty lucky to have such a variety of ideas and people constantly pushing me in this program. Because our class load is lighter this semester, we've been able to go to more campus activities. For instance, the departments all have weekly seminars with invited speakers. I have been attending the Geology and EBIO seminars. EBIO is also hiring a large-scale ecologist and we will be able to go to the candidates' interview talks over the next few weeks. Some of us have also been going to weekly journal clubs like EBIO's Eco/Evo Reading Group that focuses on ecology and evolutionary biology topics. This has been a great way to get to know people in the departments and to get a feel for the communities on campus.
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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