DREU Andrea Howells

Daily Life

This week was busy busy busy! I spent extra hours in the lab to finish the work and the report. Back in my room, I had to clean my assigned areas and my room and pack everything. As I prefer to travel with clean cloths, I also did my laundry the night before leaving. I hated to throw away so many things, but I did try to plan for it by reusing plastic items during my stay.

Research

In week 9, 1RFO and DNP, IgE and FceR pdb files were imported to Chimera, then to Maya and reformatted for Vizmo. Ige and FceR were also reformatted as cube robots. This week, each of these files were further refined as cube robots to better visually match the original formats. These improved formats were imported to and successfully tested in Vizmo.

Lidong Wang started working with the group this week. He's working towards his PhD. Rachel and I showed him the programs we had been working with and where the files are stored.

A final draft of the report was prepared and suggestions for corrections/improvements were received from John Baxter and were incorporated.

I was able to use a some of my Python education. Rachel needed a script to quickly and easily and repeatedly remove some numbers from a file. It's just a small file, but it was nice to do some programming from scratch. We had done quite a bit of modification to programs others had written using C++, which was fun, however, this was a nice change.

A readme on on how to import a pdb into Maya, and export from Maya to Vizmo was placed in the help files our group used.

On Thursday, we attended the final Brown Bag presentation of the summer. This presentation was every bit as interesting and informative as the others. The topic was Life After Graduate School: Truths from Industry, Lab, and Academia Representatives. The series of presentations given at these Brown Bag seminars has significantly increased my interest in pursuing graduate studies. I had been interested previously, but I was sure that I wouldn't financially be able to pursue graduate studies. These discussions have enlightened me and I will look further into the possibility of continuing my studies.

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Dr. Lydia Tapia, I enjoyed every minute of my internship and can not thank you enough for your instruction and assistance.