The project that I worked with was meant to help expand understanding of the vision fields of Hyperiidae, a suborder of small marine amphipods. They have a range of complex, compound eye infrastructures. My work was to help build knowledge of how these infrastructures may have evolved, how they serve the species that hold them, and how similar principles could be applied in human-generated vision systems. I worked at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, in the Marine Invertebrate Zoology section. For my project, I worked directly under Dr. Karen Osborn, who researches polychaetes and peracarids with the NMNH. I also worked with Jake Manger and Dr. Jan Hemmi from the University of Western Australia, as well as working with Matthew Kweskin, a part of the IT department who handles the Smithsonian's High Performance Computing cluster.
On an average day, I would begin by connecting remotely to the Smithsonian's HPC cluster and checking the previous round of deep heatmap regression training to see how they resolved. If there was no trouble, I would begin a new round of training, based on different selected points from the Vibilia specimens. If there was any difficulty, I would edit the config files based on the errors received before restarting the failed round of training. Trainings take a significant amount of time, so while these were running, I generally loaded the Matlab MCTV program designed by Dr. Hemmi and worked on plotting eye points manually; the process for this was to find an approximate perpendicular plane to the sections of the eye I was currently plotting, find a rough location of the point based on the three views given, and then check the accuracy of each plotted point by loading the scan as 3D view. Throughout the day, I would continue checking for errors in the training; if none appeared, I would continue plotting points manually and adding to the documentation for the MCTV program as well as the deep heatmap regression model.
Obviously, my work taught me a lot about modelling and about invertebrate biology. More broadly, though, being in the Smithsonian and attending the floor meetings, I saw directly the impacts of changing federal funding on research. In Colloquium, we talked about how research gets funded; the fact that how researchers fund various projects depends on what purpose that society finds for them. Observing the location and the people within it, I was able to see clearly the areas that the department was already operating below its maximum capacity, and the expectations that those operations would continue to shrink as funding was reduced. The researchers at the National Museum of Natural History were more passionate about their work than almost anyone I've seen, with members routinely working excessively long days because they loved the subject they were working with. It was enlightening to see so directly how much of a divide there was between how important these topics were to my coworkers and how important they were to the bodies that fund them. I think this deepened my understanding of what it takes to get funded, and informed the work that I've done in other classes (like ENGL398V, my environmental technical writing course) around grant applications.
I went into this experience thinking that, while it wasn't a part of my career plans, it was a major interest of mine that I would be interested in looking into. However, I was actually able to tie in more of the skills that are relevant to my career than I imagined. I worked with biology, but also in large part with modelling and more computer science based applications. This gave me the chance to expand on my experience with languages like Matlab and Python, which I've worked with in the past; if I were to prepare more for this research opportunity, I would have wanted to brush up on Python through coursework. Going forward, I unfortunately don't plan on making much change to my academic plans based on this experience, since I have a very tight schedule as to what I can fit into my four year plan. However, this project has given me the perspective to keep an eye out for opportunities that I find interesting that may not fall into the classical expectations for my major. I think it's distinctly possible that this project will have served as the basis for future work in vision systems, finding a way to tie in my biology interest to my Electrical Engineering degree. Even if I choose to pursue my other electrical engineering interests, like power generation, I think it would be nice to find ways to be involved with research like this in some small way.
Despite the importance of other people in this project, it wasn't particularly a collaborative project. More than anything, I worked individually as an extension of the others; I had more autonomy than I was used to, which was an interesting experience. Overall, I would definitely recommend a similar opportunity to future students. There were a lot of difficulties that came up on my end, but I found it to be an incredibly rewarding experience. I think the element that made it most so was my interest in the subject; I think that the material is very interesting personally, but it might be less significant of an opportunity for students who don't have that interest in amphipod biology. However, I think finding an opportunity like this one, based on your personal interests, is definitely valuable and I would strongly recommend it if possible!