Additional Research Opportunities

Students are invited to participate in additional research opportunities in addition to Project Success. Some of our PIs have generously offered to host a student or two in their labs. Interested students should read the activity descriptions and contact the Program Coordinator, Rocio Nunez Pepen, for more information.

Undiagnosed Diseases Network- Kimberly LeBlanc

General Information

• The Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) is a research study focused on finding answers for patients with undiagnosed conditions and making discoveries to improve diagnosis and care for these patients. The UDN Coordinating Center is located at Harvard Medical School.
• Research participation involves an application process, in-person visit for research and clinical tests and procedures, (usually) genome sequencing, and additional research studies including RNA sequencing, model organisms, metabolomics, and functional studies.
• Adult and pediatric applicants are welcome to apply from within and outside the United States. There are 12 clinical sites across the US that evaluate patients.

Research Opportunity Overview

• Involvement will be 100% remote; the time commitment is expected to be 5-10 hours/week.
• By the end of the experience, we hope that you will have gained an understanding of rare disease research through participation in meetings and completion of an independent project.
• You and your mentor will meet weekly to discuss the schedule for the week and observations/questions from the previous week.

Immunology & Autoimmune Disease- Dr. Vaishali Moulton 

Dr. Vaishali Moulton is an Assistant Professor in Medicine whose research focuses on the immune response in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE). Dr. Moulton hopes to work with up to three interns that show interest in learning more about the immune system. Students will meet virtually in three one hour sessions to talk over a research presentation in their interested immunology study. At the end of the program, students will be able to present a 10-15 minute engaging presentation on what they learned. Interested students will work to do their own research and talk over their findings with a field expert.

Visual Attention Lab - Dr. Jeremy Wolfe

We primarily study visual attention. Specifically, we are interested in visual search: our ability to find what we are looking for in a world full of things we are not looking for. How is our attention guided to our target? What and how much can we successfully pay attention to? What happens when potential targets receive our attention? Visual search tasks are ubiquitous, we do them all the time, and in a wide variety of different contexts -- from looking for a specific sweater in a messy bedroom, to a radiologist looking for a possible tumor in a mammogram. Generally speaking, we do research in Visual Perception: How does visual input become what we see and recognize, and why does the world look the way it does?

Each student will be encouraged to take on a project of their own, inspired by current research in the lab. Typically, we present students with a starting off point (e.g., a first experiment) in the hopes that they will come up with interesting follow-up experiments to explore and conduct. They will be asked to make sure the experiments are working as they should, and then will contribute to data collection and analysis. This year's experiments will be related to the following questions: 1. People often 'scan' their memory for a set of relevant items while searching for them among other non-relevant items (e.g., scanning through a list of memorized fruit, while searching for these fruit in the supermarket). Often, all or most of the items are relevant to one's visual search, but in many cases only a subset of these learned items are relevant in a specific context (e.g., it is not useful to search for dairy products in the produce section). Can one segregate his/her memory set into different subsets of items according to search demands? Our research examines the relations between memory and visual perception, two highly important processes involved in everyday behavior. 2. How much are we aware of in our environment? Past research seems to show that people can only attend to very few items in the dynamic world (perhaps 2-4). A new line of our current research suggests that people may have much larger capacity than what has been previously reported. This knowledge may be imprecise, but it is still sufficient to help us better understand our surroundings. Can this ability be further improved by learning? Does it interact with memory? Does it change with the structure of the scene? The goal of this research is to understand the limits of attention in the real world. 3. A radiologist searching for something specific (e.g., lung cancer) is also responsible for reporting any "incidental findings" (e.g., pneumonia) that could be clinically significant. Incidental findings are frequently missed, and these have proven to be stubborn errors to reduce. We have developed an analogue task to use in the lab with non-expert observers. First: how can we reduce these errors in non-expert observers? Second, can we implement those strategies to improve detection of incidental findings in clinical radiology?