Over the summer, I worked as a research volunteer at the National Museum of Natural History in the Invertebrate Zoology department under Dr. Karen Osborn. There, I worked with the eyes of marine amphipod species, in order to help get a better understanding of their vision fields. I found Dr. Osborn through a previous SGC student, Maiya, who had volunteered under her previously. Maiya suggested reaching out by email, and I did so; even though it can feel strange, I do think that cold emailing researchers is an underused way of making those connections. As long as you reach out politely and express interest in their work, you're unlikely to receive much worse than a polite no, and you open the door to finding involvement in research you'd really be interested in.
At the Osborn Lab, I worked on performing three main tasks. First, I manually plotted the points of interest along the eyes of the hyperiids, identifying the corneas and rhabdoms for each ommatidia. I did this using the MCTV Matlab program designed by Dr. Jan Hemmi, and a series of NIfTI scans. This was a long process, given the number of eye points that each specimen had, so I also worked on adapting existing code (DHR from Jake Manger) for running a deep heatmap regression to find the eye points of fiddler crabs and Paraphronima species, with the goal of creating models for a variety of hyperiid species. Most of the work I did in this regard was adapting the model to run on the Smithsonian's HPC cluster, which is intended to allow for more simultaneous training in the future. However, there were a number of difficulties that meant that the training on new species was not implemented while I was there. Finally, I worked on clarifying the documentation for the MCTV and DHR systems. The existing documentation was focused on conveying information to someone with some experience in using the systems, as a way of making sure they were undertaking the process correctly. I worked to help clarify documentation for new users in order to make future use of the models more easily expanded.
Throughout this process, I got to learn a great deal about hyperiid biology and behaviors, which I found quite interesting. Obviously, I became fairly familiar with how exactly their eyes were structured (or at least the species that I worked with), but I also learned a lot about their development and habits. As an extension of this, I learned a bit about the habits of salps, jellyfish, and other soft-bodied invertebrates that often serve as homes and food sources for hyperiids. Additionally, at the IZ department, the floor would hold regular presentations by researchers on their specific field of research; I had an opportunity to learn about sponges, jellies, and coral classification through these presentations. Alongside the biology, I learned about modelling in Matlab and was able to gain some direct experience with code in Matlab as well as in Python.
Outside of science, I think that my time at the NMNH expanded the possibilities in my mind of what electrical engineering could mean. Although I was working in zoology, which I have a passion for but no academic experience with, I worked with Dr. Hemmi who was an electrical engineer, as well as Jake Manger (a computer scientist). This gave me the opportunity to see just how interconnected fields can be, and how a degree in one subject doesn't necessarily preclude you from working in a related field you feel passionately about. I'm not sure that I'll end up going into zoology, necessarily, although I would be happy to do so; there are a lot of very interesting fields out there, and zoology doesn't have the biggest demand for electrical engineering. However, the range of non-traditional applications for an electrical engineering degree is something that I want to keep in mind as I move out of college and into work.