My Research Experience

In the summer of 2019, I worked in the Duncan Lab on UMD’s campus through a program called the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Summer Undergraduate Research Program (URP). This lab studies chronic lung infections and is searching for ways to treat and prevent them. My project was studying how the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa affects mucus in the lungs of people with Cystic Fibrosis. Over this period I conducted many experiments on the bacteria such as studying its growth cycle and implementing it into hydrogels made to mimic the mucus of Cystic Fibrosis patients.  

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Overall, this experience taught me a lot about research. Since I was the main person in the lab working on this project, I learned about how to organize experiments, what it takes to actually get data from the experiments, and how long the experimentation process can take. Since the LSAMP program was only 8 weeks long, I had a short amount of time to get data in order to present my research at the end of the program. Organizing the experiments was the hardest part of working in the lab. At the beginning of the summer, I had a plan for what I wanted to get done every week. I soon learned that this is not how research works. For the majority of the summer, my experiments failed to give me any usable data and I was forced to work longer hours in an attempt to get some results before my LSAMP symposium. This showed me that in order to get results, it takes a lot of patience and availability, because experiments fail more often than they succeed.