Taiwan

While what most of my friends and family heard about was the culinary adventures and copious quantities of shaved ice I consumed in Taiwan, the main focus was my daily research at Taipei Medical University. After deciding to do an internship in Taipei, I looked through various university web pages and contacted various departments inquiring about internships. After considering a few options, I chose to work in Dr. Jihwan Myung's Braintime lab at Taipei Medical University, whose primary research focus was circadian rhythms. Other than the PI, we had a French post-doctorate, a Vietnamese PhD student, an American master's student, and a Taiwanese medical student, so it was a vast and diverse assortment of lab members.

For the first week or so, I helped in the lab and learned about the research areas and how the lab worked. The lab studies circadian rhythms using mice as a model organism. After the first week, I developed a research project looking at the effect of t-cycles on the female mice's estrous cycle and proposing possible mechanistic explanations for any results. T-cycles are non 24-hour days. So, in our lab, we put our mice cages in small black boxes, which consisted of a light and motion sensor. We wired the boxes to a computer program that the lab designed that allowed us to customize each box's day and night schedules individually. With my project, I first had a baseline control period of 24-hour day/night cycles and then split the mice into 22 (11-hour day/11-hour night) and 26-hour cycles. I would collect and analyze daily samples under a microscope to track the estrous cycle. After conducting my experiment for four weeks, I was unfortunately unable to find any statistically significant results. Still, my research holds promise for future work with a larger sample size over a more extended period.