The An-Jel

So you studied Physics and Electrical Engineering Og... a question for you? I mean your not an actual surgeon. What do you do?

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Og

I'm completing my PhD in biophysics. I mainly focus on instrument design and construction. We have the premier nanofabrication facility for research purposes here on Cornell's campus and the Nanobiotechnology center. I design micro-devices that I implant into living systems to record electrical signals from their nerves (i work in the crayfish for most of my device design). I work with micro-electronics and do software development as well.

Mainly my dissertation is about bringing engineering instrumentation and analysis concepts into the realm of neurobiology in a way that's never really been done before.

There's lots of specific projects but it mainly fits under the realm of instrumentation.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

debdodd

Interesting work but gotta ques?... does your instrument development in, recording impulses of the nonvertebral bodies, have cross over implications into/for human use? on the assumption that it does ... for it seems most scientist tend to direct studies that ultimately impact humans ... for as far as I know ..... no one gives a fat bunny's butt if a snail or crayfish looses it's ability to move ... it's just moved on the food chain ... anyway .. the reason I ask is 1st curiosity and oddly enough .... today one of the Boy Scouts in my son's troop ... they were on a weekend sled tip ... male bonding crap ... yipee, I thought I had gotten rid of hubby & son for the whole weekend but no... damn it .... and this is where I get back to neurons, etc ... one of the boys, 14 years old was sledding down the hill, went airborne, crashed and burned bad ... hit a tree ... short version ... horrible injury to L 1 vertebre ... ended up having to "life line" the poor kid to our local Level 1 Trauma Hospital ... difficulty breating, no sensation ... bad stuff ... he wasn't a skinny little 14 year old ... he wears a size 17 shoe so a big kid ... They got lucky b/c at the ... sled resort/hovel/shack (I'm not a good scout mom so I don't know all the Boy Scout terms) there was a surgeon ... he jumped on a sled ....slid down the hill (even pre-paramedics arrival) and probably saved the kid more spinal cord damage very Dr James Bondish of the doc, certainly not meaning to make light of the unfortunate incident but how .... random .... these kids are out in the middle of no where and BAM ... there's a surgeon who takes over, tells the paramedics exactly what to do .... short and sweet in some respects .... eternity for the poor parents .... damn I do ramble on after a little wine ... so once again back to my question .... crap .... gotta look back at this to remember the question ... okay .... what type of instumentation? as in biomechanical that will allow for artificial firing of neurons so that this information can be cross used ... ultimately for para/quadraplegics to have a chance at mobility or is the instumentation strictly to track/trace the pathways, etc for further evaluation purposes? I know they have some some biomechanical arms, etc that work with the brain ... so since I read your posting and it hit close to home in light of today's events .... I was just curious ..... sometimes random happenings and life have this odd juxtaposition ... you know the whole 6 degree of seperation thing ... or I don't know ... I mean really .... out of the blue .... I've been out with the girl friend, because no one is home and I am FREE, thinking, alright! no kid! no hubby ... I am old enuf, wise enuf and have a open VISA card where I can dine and drink with the girls and know I can afford a cab back to suburbia if necessary .... and have to shorten the evening due to a neuron interruption .... everyone was/were to traumitized to spend the night at said "sled hell" .... so I come home .... creep up to my cubby whole trying to hid my good buzz from said hubby and kid ... got keep up my stepford wife image don't ya know and so there I find your posting .... where as in the old days of just eating food straight out of the refrigerator or container, over the sink ... you know the good old days when you would just drink from the milk carton sans glass ... I try to hid my buzz by getting on line .....
Sooooooo anyway this is my thinking .... I always get to my point eventually ... .... statistic wise and randomnization wise ... what are the odds of this being .... well .... random? I mean your posting re: neural pathways and my "drinking interruptus" from neural pathway disaster, going to into seclusion as a diversion (no one interupts Mom when she's working on the computer) and the collision of all of this .... random or me just really buzzed? so I guess I had more than 1 question for you ...

BTW ... your girlfriend's psych rotation, depending if it's done in a semi-private, or state run hospital, will leave her with a whole lotta stories ... if she gets to do any kiddie psch ... those will be her wildest stories and biggest nightmares .... adult psych is odd/fasinating/weird enough but she's obviously gone into medicine to fix people (most of the time) ... when she has to deal with the kids, it's one of the more difficult areas ... like I said in anothe posting ... seeing "little crazy kids" that are permanently broken and no amount of fixing is going to work is difficult for a healer ... it's what I call the Humpty Dumpty Factor ... shell person ... they are to cracked to be ever put back together again ....

okay ... done babbling, kid and hubby are nighty nite ... going to go enjoy the rest of my buzz ... maybe go drink some milk straight from the jug ... find a bag of Doritos and call it a night! ... have a good evenig ... previewed this post and Jeeezzzz do my thoughts wander all over or what!!

Og

Here's a link to a paper abstract I've written about a system I designed for organism level network structure analysis in some model systems.

I've recently submitted a paper about the micro-electrodes that i've designed for recording from peripheral nerve bundles (yes, applicable in both human and invertebrate systems). That will be coming out in an IEEE journal this year.

Here's a link to part of my project description for one of the things I'm working on[/url]

I'm a teaching assistant in bionb491 at cornell this term too.

All of these things are going in my dissertation. I'm currently writing some software that will be used in the class I'm TAing and will be used by neurophysiologists in my department.

The software is data acquisition and analysis software for sorting and correlating events in multi-channel neural recordings. For example, some people from the cornell medical school have sent me recordings from a deep brain stimulation electrode implantation as the device descended through layers of the brain. My software will acquire these signals and develop a signal content map of the path from the surface of the brain to the space where the electrode is designed to stimulate in order to aid the doctors in implantation.

They implant these deep brain stimulation electrodes in parkinsons patients in order to help them regain motor control.

So, mainly, my work is on Analog and digital instrumentation. Sensors. And software based acquisition and analysis for neurobiology on a variety of levels from nanodevices implanted and recording from single nerves to field recordings from brain tissue to large scale systems that look at behavior in a high resolution manner.

It's some really cool stuff and certainly has applications in all realms of neurophysiology research and neural medicine.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

debdodd

I've read/seen some info in Medical journal re: those type of studies you spoke of re: Parkinson's patients ... sounds like promising new frontiers.

Did you do your undergrad work at Cornel or another university? When did you first get interested in this course of study. I ask b/c my son (Alex /16) is all over the place in what he wants to study in college. He goes to a private college prep high school here .... had to get him out of the public school system .... very smart kid ... but sometimes just a normal 16 year old goof ball ... his plans have included everything from being a psychiatrist to working at McDonalds (his thought was that by working there he would be able to get the coolest Happy Meal toy before the other kids ... pretty sound reasoning for a 5 year old). He is taking some AP classes next fall, one is in Chemistry. Anyway ... we've started looking into colleges, while it would help us out finacially for him to go in state ... he prefers out of state. His high school is $17,000 a year ...so college is gonna kill me! He's my only child (the 2 dtrs are my step kids) so if I have to work until I'm 70 to help him ... so be it.

Since you obviously weren't some dumb ass high school kid, smoking in the bathroom and eating paste in art class, what direction were you headed in high school? It might help me assist him in a direction ... I wanted him to attend Notre Dame ... but found that Xavier University(Ohio) has one of the highest rates of acceptance into Med School .... of course it's their job (college recruiters) to sell their schools. I am having a little difficulty in assisting him just because a) he's so much smarter than me b) my desire to keep him close .... how did you or your parents help guide you in the right direction? Did you have a mentor is HS?

Thanks for bearing with me ... I just want to help him with his focus ...

BTW ... only a minimal hangover this AM ... just allittle pain above the left eye

Og

I don't really know that much about medical school and what college is important to go to. I'm an engineer poking his head into biological sciences. I got a degree in physics and one in electrical engineering from Auburn University (Alabama) in 2001. I have family in the area and my parents both went there. They were living on the central coast of California when I was an undergraduate.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

debdodd

I guess where I was really going with my line of questions were ... what were your interests at a similar age? I sometimes thinks he says he wants to be an MD b/c it is something I wanted to do, I don't want him to live out my dreams ... I want to encourage his own ... Your undergrad work was engineering, physics but it crossed over into medical application realm. Right now he's into studying comparitive religions and wants to put up a Shinto Shrine in his room .... When he was 11 he wanted to be come Buddhist .. I got him the "for Dummies" version of it ... he likes your Avatar and asks what it means ... he's so funny .. he's a mix of smart kid plus he has a harem of girls! His Latin teacher and I talk about this cloud of women always around him! I think this forum will be interesting to him .... Soooo what were your aspirations at 16 ... academic not just getting your drivers liscense

Og

Honestly, I was very unmotivated in high school. My parents ended up sending me to community college the summer after my sophomore year and I skipped straight to my senior year and graduated early. It wasn't until I read a bunch of science fiction by isaac asimov and got all crazy into a physics class with an amazing professor that I got all up and into science and such.

I had always been good with math too. But honestly, I know that today is an entirely different world for kids with the internet. I'm basically on the exact crest of the wave of this computer generation. I was produced in 1979 and grew up with computers. I was in high school pre-internet and such.

I really don't know what to say. We have access to so much cool stuff these days. Kids just need really inspiring figures doing awesome things. I found that in a physics professor who then made me realize that it was in me too.

My advice to everyone is to take more and more math to higher and higher levels. People say that math isn't useful in life and they have no idea what they're talking about. Math is a way of looking at a world that is universal to humanity. Its a mindset that allows you to approach, express, and solve any problem you face. Not just because you know how to take a derivative. Because you know what a derivative means and what it expresses and how it describes the behavior of things.

Anyway, that's pretty much all the advice I can give. Math and more math. It applies in any profession and any situation in life. It's the basic language of existence. It's amazing stuff.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

Once the structure of the universe started appearing in the physics and math that I saw and as I developed the terminology and tools to express what it was that I could see, i was hooked. Electrical engineers are amazing folk integrating in all this cool stuff into great applications.

My senior design project as an undergrad EE was the construction of an electromagnetic weapon (Rail Gun) that was a meter long 300 pound monster that launched a 4g projectile at just over 1 mile/second velocity!

I can empirically show (using a single measurement of a crystal at very low temperatures) that there are 3 physical dimensions to the universe and that we're not actually missing out on another one somewhere.

I can produce simulations of complex systems and record from neurons which are the basic structure of the self. Being and electrical engineer (i.e. well versed in information systems and computer architecture) has made this path through neuroscience an amazing ride.

Your kid sounds like he's having a great time.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

And if your kid is still interested in buddhism, get him the book "Myths of Light" by Joseph Campbell. It's an amazing tour of eastern religion. Joseph Campbell is the guy who helped george lucas create the force in the star wars trilogy and is probably the greatest theologian of the last century or so.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are