Oh, Paris...

It's been four years to the day since the letter arrived from MIT.

I got in.

Grad School Interviews

When it rains, it pours, or so the saying goes. After months of emails, applications, and waiting, this week I had some activity on both of the grad school fronts I’ve been pursuing. Monday night I learned that Prof. Henry Markram invited me to attend Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Hiring Days, an interview and orientation session held on January 15-16 in Lausanne, Switzerland. This really was quite an honor as Prof. Markram is an incredibly exciting professor. He is head of the Blue Brain project, a high-profile project sponsored by IBM and run through the Brain-Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). This project, described as the neuroscience equivalent of the Human Genome project, seeks to map out the neural microcircuitry of the human brain and reconstruct the brain through computer simulations. The project is ground-breaking and joining it would be no less than thrilling.

Twenty-four hours after getting the exciting news, I was in the air on my way to Paris yet again. Of the 129 initial applicants to the Ecole des Neurosciences de Paris Ile-de-France (ENP), I was one of the final six left by the time Interview Day came around. After sending in a paper application in late September, I had also phone-interviewed in mid-November and finally there came this: an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris, but not exactly a vacation. After arriving in the heart of Paris shortly after midnight, I got a few hours sleep before a long day of interviews, presentations, lab visits, and finally a three-hour dinner with the ENP staff (at an undeniably quaint, quite enjoyable restaurant in the 11^th Arrondissement called Chez Paul, 13 rue de Charonne). The experience was very much like dangling a particularly savory piece of bacon just out of reach of a very hungry puppy; I could hardly bear hearing all about the program all day without knowing whether or not I will be accepted.

By the time the day was done, I was very pleased to meet up with Jeremi, my good friend and fellow Fifth Wester (in other words, a person from my floor in my dorm) who’s studying abroad at Ecole Polytechnique this year. (On a side note, I had a very happy piece of news that evening when checking my email: indeed a place has been reserved for me to move back onto Fifth West, the place I’ve called home for the past three years, so that I can live with my best friends for my very last semester at MIT.) Jeremi and I settled on a heated, covered outdoor deck of a bar to sip vin chaud and enjoy the company of someone so very familiar so far from home. It was incredibly refreshing to spend a bit more time with someone who needs so little explanation to understand me so completely. By the time the bar closed, the metro had already stopped running so we took a late-night meander through Paris while continuing our conversation. Wandering aimlessly through cities with friends has always been one of my favorite activities (just check facebook). When you make that city Paris, it’s hard to find much about which to complain.

Despite the late hour at which I ultimately returned home, I made an early start for my free day in Paris. After a quick tour through the Luxembourg Gardens, I found the famous English-language bookshop right by Notre Dame and immediately understood why my Scuola Normale friend majoring in Italian and French Literature at Oxford spoke so highly of the place. Just look at how many books have been jammed into this place! And in perusing through the store, I had to resist the temptation to buy at least a few of them. Supposedly this store is also a great way to find yourself an Anglophone, presumably lit-geeky (more or less the anti-MIT-style, potentially more socially adept) network, which could come in quite handy if living in Paris. After this I took a grand tour of central Paris, hitting many of the major tourist sights and generally walking the streets to get a feel for mid-day Parisian life in the Christmas season. Today I even wore my glasses just so that I could soak in as much detail as possible in this city so rich with beauty. (That's la Madeleine, the church in the center of la Place de la Madeleine, pictured on the left. There are some trendy and quite pricey shops in this area of Paris.)

Finally I caught up with my friend from Ecole Normale Supérieure, Gabriel, over coffee at a little café for my last couple hours before flying home. For the first time together we managed to speak exclusively French. Though living in Italy obliterated my ability to speak Spanish, it has somehow improved my ability to speak French. I found myself seated with a native French speaker, chatting and laughing, feeling quite relaxed (even if still far from fluent) in the language I’ve so loved and studied so long. It really made me smile and was a wonderful way to close up my sixth and final visit to Paris in 2008.

A Lab Update

Things are going pretty well in lab these days. There’s nothing too thrilling but there’s a lot of work to be done and that in itself is satisfying. The project has taken a focus in the use of chemoattractants encapsulated in microspheres for the direction of neuronal growth in vitro. I’ve been busy doing literature searches, data analysis, and presentation work this week in order to summarize everything we’ve done thus far concerning microsphere drug release properties. We recently began working with the cells (finally!), introducing them to plates with adhered microspheres. However, we haven’t had too much luck getting them to grow with semaphorin, our chemoattractant of choice.

These days, I work almost exclusively at the Scuola Normale Superiore in the NEST lab. Technically, I’m a student in the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna ARTS lab because this is where the professor who is formally sponsoring me works, but I have not even stepped foot inside that building since the beginning of July. Often times, in the morning, I’ll spend an hour or so at the CRIM lab in the Cisanello hospital in the outskirts of Pisa before going to NEST. I don’t like the CRIM lab so much. We have a trailer with only a few rooms and less than ten people who work there regularly. Such an isolated environment does not permit an influx of exciting new ideas and perspectives.

NEST is great because it’s tucked away in a tiny piazza but it is right in the center of Pisa. At lunch sometimes I go out with people, but more often I prefer to be by myself. I like to wander through Pisa and go to a local park (featured in this entry's pictures) where I spend time on the swings if it isn’t raining (as it is today). Maybe that's crazy, but it makes me smile. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my shadow in my heels on a swing made for people far smaller than me and I just burst out laughing. Anyway, I had to at least try to share the image with you.

I enjoy the environment here at the Scuola Normale Superiore (or simply "la Normale"). The facilities are sparkling new, I have my own desk space, and there are plenty of chances for me to converse with people in both Italian and French which of course thrills me to pieces. When I’m stuck at my computer, as I am today, I slip off my shoes and sit contentedly at my desk with my earbuds on, pleased that I keep my briefcase stocked with a large, fuzzy pair of bright blue socks with those no-slip grips on the bottom. So now, back to work!

Grad School Hunting

I’ve been talking for a couple of years about possibly going to grad school in Europe. I’m having a wonderful time here and I’d like to stay overseas at least a few more years. After an exhaustive search for interesting PhD programs, here are the schools I am most seriously considering:

• Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

• Eldgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland

• Ecole des Neurosciences de Paris (a new, collaborative, international PhD program), Paris, France

• Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy

I enjoyed my weekend in London this fall, but I realized when I was there that that was all I wanted it to be: just a weekend, a nice little break when I could slip back into my native tongue. Really, I adore the challenge of living in another language. I would like to live outside the English-speaking world until I no longer need to operate in English to express myself to the fullest extent.

More updates to come as the application process progresses!

Protests in Pisa

During the past couple of weeks, Pisa has been pretty crazy. There have been major student protests through the streets because of the Italian Decree Law 112/08. This decree law was passed by the Italian executive branch and must be approved by the legislative branch by the end of the year in order for it to go into permanent effect. The law will cut back on already severely limited research funding, dismiss many untenured faculty, and restrict many elementary education programs. I could go on: the law has many bad implications for a country that is already seeing a mass exodus of intellectuals as there are not enough positions for researchers in the country. An editorial about this was just published in Nature this week: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7215/full/455835b.html#top

Sheets painted in statements of protest against the decree law decorate the whole city of Pisa. In fact, as I'm writing, Claudia and Danilo are busy in our apartment painting another sign to hang up. Students have been staging all-night sit-ins in university buildings; I went to one last Thursday. Parents have been bringing their elementary-age children out to the protests. Thousands of people have been filling piazzas in Pisa, and this is just one Italian city.

Interestingly, many of these images of student protest are not reaching the media because the Italian President, Silvio Berlusconi, is a major media tycoon in Italy. In an effort to get the word out, Danilo and his friends are setting up a website. I’ve offered to help edit the English translation, so in some small way I’m showing my solidarity with the students of Pisa. It’s an exciting time to be here, but it makes me really sad for my Italian friends. I’ve chosen to research outside of my home country; this certainly was not forced upon me. Many Italians find themselves forced to choose between their home and their research. I never imagined that in a country in western Europe, a part of the world considered to be so modern and “civilized," citizens would be facing troubles like this.

NEST Laboratory Inauguration

I have been working in one lab at the Cisanello hospital (in the outskirts of Pisa) and a second lab called NEST, the National Enterprise for NanoScience and NanoTechnology. The latter is a part of the physics department in the Scuola Normale Superiore. Although I’ve been working there since July, NEST didn’t officially open until today. There was high security at the inauguration and some of the politicians scheduled to come chose to cancel to avoid the protests in Pisa. As the Scuola Normale Superiore thrives on funding from the European Union, Italy continues to cut back on state funding for scientific research in light of the global economic crisis as well as long-term economic woes. Recent cut-backs affecting all levels of the Italian education system are causing a lot of unrest amongst university students. One of my friends from the University of Pisa is still unsure as to what he will be able to do after graduating in March because he does not know if the programs that interest him will even have the funds needed to take on any new students. I can’t help but feel a bit guilty that amidst the struggle young Italians face in finding funding for research, I’ve arrived in their country and contented myself with ample funding and a comfortable position in two of their labs. I am all the more grateful for the opportunity to work in this brand-new, lovely facility.

Delightfully symbolic of the relation between innovation and tradition in Italy, NEST is entirely hidden from public view, tucked behind an old church in the small Piazza San Silvestro. Actually, one would never guess that anything was hidden through the back gate in the church parking lot unless explicitly told to pass through those doors and look for the small NEST sign. It seems wonderfully Italian to take this academic gem and hide it away in the backyard of an aging architectural beauty in a state of mild disrepair.

Summertime as an Italian Neuroengineer

I haven’t added an entry having anything to do with science for a while. This is because being an Italian neuroengineer means, for better or worse, doing very little during the summer. To succeed here, you’ve got to have a lot of patience. People don’t move so fast or work so many hours. Results don’t come as quickly. People take their own sweet time. At least during the summer. This has proven to be fairly frustrating for me because I only have six months here. However, when considering a lifetime as a scientist, it’s also a pleasant idea to think that I might actually get some time off each and every year. I’ll have to wait to see how the fall goes. I hope that, as promised, the pace of research will pick up. Right now I'm still waiting on a lightbulb replacement in my microscope... the order was placed in late July. Can you say frustrating?

I'm starting to compile a final list of grad schools to which I will apply. I’ll probably include several schools in Europe in addition to some in America. In the end, well, I don’t know what I want yet! But I have to say, Europe is extremely interesting. There is just so much to see: so many major cities so near each other and with much more affordable transportation between them. It could certainly be worth at least a few more years here. But then again, you can’t deny the allure of Southern California…

Today's clip art is from WebWeaver .

The First Italian National Conference on Bioengineering

Last week was an excellent work week. Finally having finished reading my small heap of papers, I stretched on my first pair of latex gloves and began my wet lab work. For now, I'm in a small lab in the Cisanello Hospital in the outskirts of Pisa. Here, I am making small PLGA (clear gel) microspheres (diameter on the order of 1 micrometer) that will slowly release a chemoattractant (drug) over the course of two weeks in order to chemically direct neuronal growth in Petri dishes.

On Thursday, I had the good fortune to attend the first ever Italian National Conference on Bioengineering! My heart-rate skyrocketed yesterday morning: I walked into the Neural Engineering poster session on the third and final day of this conference. I finally met some of the scientists whose work had lured me away from France and to this country whose language I hardly know. There were so many amazing research presentations. I've since been in touch with one of these researchers and might even take a weekend trip to check out just how he uses cultures of rat cortical neurons to control his robots. (Amazing!)

Lab: My Home(s) away from Home

During the first few days following my arrival in Italy, I began to get a feel for Pisa. I got myself a phone (email if you need the number), found an apartment right by the Pisa soccer stadium with an excellent view of the Leaning Tower, and dove headfirst into a large stack of science papers!

To carry out my research project, I am using facilities at three different laboratories: the ARTS Lab (Advanced Robotics Technology and Systems), the CRIM Lab (Center for Research in Microengineering), and the NEST Lab (National Enterprise for nanoScience and nanoTechnology). The first two of these labs are affiliated with the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, whereas the latter is affiliated with the Scuola Normale Superiore. Both of these schools are located in Pisa.

You can learn more about these labs by following these links:

ARTS Lab http://www.sssup.it/context.jsp?ID_LINK=59&area=47

CRIM Lab http://www-crim.sssup.it/

NEST Lab http://www.sns.it/it/laboratori/laboratoriscienze/nest/

The facilities available in these labs are top-notch. I’m thoroughly impressed by the work being done here and I’m incredibly excited to be a part of this research team for the next six months.

My Research Project: Testing Methods to Direct Neuronal Growth

So what exactly am I doing at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna?
My research project proposal is entitled The Pied Piper of the Peripheral Nervous System: Comparing Guidance Cues for Directing Neuronal Growth. This sums up pretty well what I am doing. The abstract of my proposal reads as follows:

The future of prosthetic devices lies in their integration into the body’s nervous system. The next generation of prosthetics, called neural prosthetics, will enable patients to move prosthetic devices using their minds and will recreate feeling through sensors in the mechanical limbs. The greatest challenge arises in connecting the peripheral nervous system and the prosthetic. The regenerating neurons in an amputated limb must be guided towards an implanted electrode so they communicate efficiently with the prosthetic. Researchers have already reported several different methods to direct neuronal growth, but I have found no published work which compares their efficacy. This summer, I will test the use of chemical, physical, and optical guidance cues to quantitatively compare these methods for directing growth in vitro. I hope to provide knowledge necessary for researchers to optimize the design of neural prosthetics. This new technology promises to vastly improve the lives of amputees.

Hopefully this gives you a bit of an idea as to why I'm here. If you're still curious, I'm only an email away.