"Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Matt Rowan.
I work with Jason Christie, he's group leader at Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.
We look at the physiology of neurons, so basically how neurons actually work and how they behave.
I study a part of a neuron called the, ""axon"" and the axon is a cable that's attached to
these neurons that actually sends signals to one neuron to the next.
So what I like about being able to work in the lab is of course the discovery feature
of science as first and foremost, but also the freedom you get when you're working in
an academic style lab like we do.
I was born in New York and I grew up there from a very young stage I knew I wanted to
do science.
I knew I liked biology from a very young age as well, not exactly sure why it was just
kinda something that resonated with me as a kid and it wasn't until maybe the university
level that I started to become more interested in the more specific neuroscience field.
I got into research primarily because that's all I really wanted to do.
So it was pretty easy to get into in because when you're an undergraduate or a graduate
student, the people who are in charge of the lab, the heads of the labs, they always want
more help so...
If you can provide them with some work at those levels then you, initially that's a
great way to get involved.
So the harder parts are actually if you're writing a grant you know, you have to figure
out how to do that or if you're writing a paper you have to learn the style.
If you want to get published you have to realize that you have to go through a review process
and all these things take a lot of time and effort.
The things that we're interested in have been not, not extensively examined because of technical
limitation up until this point, so that's been one of the nice things about being at
Max Planck in Florida is that we've had great resources and have been able to sort of spend
time developing not only some new and difficult techniques in order to get after interesting
questions regarding these presynaptic specializations and how they work.
So in order to do that we have to give certain frequency pulses, depolarizations, what do
you think?
Speaker 2: Well I think it's good so we are going 100 hertz for all the trials.
Speaker 1: Yeah, 100 hertz.
What fascinates me about my project is the, my hope that we have to ability to sort of
look into things that others have not in great depths.
I definitely hope that this, the things that we're doing here are gonna generate novel
ideas in terms of how we can look into neurodegenerative diseases and other disease states.
The advice that I would give to a high school level students that's looking to do research
as a career is attempt to do some research right now.
Hopefully you've tried some things and work in a lab setting already quite a bit.
I mean there's plenty of opportunities for younger people to do this if you're in the
right places so, that's the advice I'd give."