R25 Hippocampus Project Summer and Fall ’20

Interns will create labels for multiple subjects across multiple timepoints and contribute to a longitudinal analysis of data acquired in control subjects and patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and AD pathology. These labels, or segmentations, will also serve to teach interns about responsible experimental design as they’ll be blinded to patient IDs, clinical diagnosis, and timepoint order. By producing labels for multiple timepoints across different subjects, interns will learn the variance of human neuroanatomy while also contributing to a robust dataset that will later be analyzed for group effects and label reliability. We anticipate that the complete set of manual labeling of longitudinal images will spur methods development in fields such as Deep Learning for the purpose of more sensitive detection of disease effects, and in fact we look forward to carrying out research in this domain ourselves as the project progresses and the set of manually labeled structures grows.

Lastly, in the final weeks of the internship, students will participate in analyzing and publishing a description of the dataset they produced over the summer. In preparation for this, interns will attend introductory lectures on scientific writing to usher them into the publication phase of the research project and more generally, the scientific process. Using a cross-over learning approach, each student will identify an article pertaining to the current literature of the designated structure for that year and contribute to the background and introduction section of the publication. As stated previously, students will also engage in the analysis portion of the project by producing descriptive statistics of the dataset and learning to properly format the graphs and figures to be included in the paper. This provides an integrated experience of generating a dataset and then analyzing the data to identify effects present in the data that are reflective of the population at large. In doing so, interns will gain an understanding of APA manuscript formatting, Excel spreadsheet analyses, and MATLAB computational software. It is our priority that students will actively participate in the writing aspect of the research project and begin to familiarize themselves with a scientific paper’s appropriate structure and composition.

Summer 2020 Cohort:

Hannah Ahmed
Elisha Alexandre
Anna Betancourt
Mayilani Goodridge
Jenelle Hill-Supris
Clarence Joseph
Ikayrah King–Freeman
Sephora Leroy
Anna Moore
Sofia Mrowka
Pranita Onta
Naomi Presume
Willa Rudel
Sadia Shafik
Jaadyahh Shearrion
Jaden Washington

Fall 2020 Cohort

Hannah Ahmed
Elisha Alexandre
Jenelle Hill-Supris
Sephora Leroy
Anna Moore
Sofia Mrowka
Amy Nguyen
Pranita Onta
Sadia Shafik
Nam Tran
Gift Udeh
Jaden Washington

Testimonials

What was your favorite experience of the internship?

“I really enjoyed everything, but my favorite part was getting to know everyone throughout the process. I’ve heard many inspiring stories and felt as this was a meaningful experience.”
Fall Intern 2020

“The mentorship was really fun. My favorite part was getting to know my mentor and looking forward to talking with them every week! I’ve made so much more connections and did all of that during a pandemic.”
– Fall Intern 2020