"So my name is Jonathan Schor.
I'm an entering NSTP student and I'm working in the Gladstone Building here at the UCSF
on the Mission Bay Campus in Yadong Huang's Lab.
The idea behind the Huang Lab's research is were focusing on the disease of Alzheimer's.
One of the things that drew me towards this lab and toward disease related neurosciences,
I wanted to take all the sort of exciting skills and exciting finds that I'd had in
lab in a basic sense and hopefully then apply them to something that was applicable to disease.
I come from a family that is and has always been into cognitive sciences.
My mom is a child neurologist and my dad is a neurophysiologist.
And through whatever reason we also happen to, in our family, have a lot of people that
exhibit some sort of neurological abnormalities later in life.
Growing up of talking science with my parents sort of that was our dinner table conversation
and it wasn't something that I necessarily felt pushed into but it was definitely something
that, you know, I saw them be excited about it and without even sorting intending to,
I also of became excited.
So my time is now split between two things.
One is a lot of coding.
Before I got to college I'd never done any sort of computer science or running coding
or anything like that.
And even in college a lot of my fellow scientists weren't necessarily interested in coding cause
they said like Oh, I can just get so and so to do it because they, that's their job.
You know, they're computer scientists or something like that.
It's, but now half of what I do in lab is running code.
The other half is actual biological experimentation so you know, we have these brains that we're
looking at that we want to discern exactly how memory loss occurs in Alzheimer's.
And we use these these various techniques like channel doctrine, this light triggered
neural activation to sort of parse out exactly what it is that is causing some of these memory
losses that we see in our Alzheimers cases.
Really this type of research is not only important, it's almost necessary for an aging population
right now and what with baby boomers and all reaching a stage in their life where they're
much more likely to get Alzheimer's.
It's really important that this research be done.
From a purely selfish standpoint I just find it challenging and fun.
A lot of what neuroscience in particular is going toward is computation and that's something
that I really enjoy.
So you get to be the one person that is coding up something that has not yet been made.
You know, you in many cases if there's a tool that you need and it's not out there, you
have to make it.
And at the same time there's this hugh technological boom that allows you to have very fine control
over neurons within the brain so the advent of channel doctrine, which is basically this
very cool tool that allows you to trigger neurons within the brain just by turning on
a light.
That makes neuroscience such an exciting field to work in that it's hard for me not to be
motivated not to continue working in it.
On the other side of things, there's always the motivation of, you know, no matter how
far in the future that treatment may be or some sort of therapy may be, it's definitely
rewarding to know that you're working on something that actually is affecting humans and no matter
what small amount you can contribute, it's working toward something that's a very positive
change.
I think the biggest thing is not to feel like you should be afraid to approach a potential
mentor or you know somebody that you're interested in working in someone's lab.
Let's say you're a high school student and you want to work in a lab.
You really have nothing to lose by just emailing somebody.
That, you know, that you read about all these universities publish little bios about what
the professors are doing.
You read a bio, you see what interests you and you just send an email.
And I think often that's the biggest stumbling block that people face when they're trying
to get into something is they're worried that if I don't already know this stuff beforehand,
why would anyone be interested in taking me into their lab.
Like maybe I haven't take a single biology class, or a single chemistry class, why would
somebody be interested in having me?
And the reason is because scientists as a whole love to have new minds to bring into
science.
We love our science and we want other people to love our science too and get other people
interested in science.
So really just by sending that email and saying like, I have this amount of experience or
I have no experience, but I'm interested, will really go a long way toward getting you,
sort of getting your hands dirty and getting into
the field."