Achievement

Chemical Engineering IGERT Trainee Christina Vasalou collaborates with Washington University (WU) biologists to understand sleep-wake pattern disruption. Historically, the "biology" has been done at WU, with experimental data sent to Christina for computational modeling. Eager for "hands-on" biology work, Christina completed a three-week, IGERT-funded "externship" to learn a variety of biological procedures, including acquisition of mouse neural tissue, techniques for measuring neural activity at the single cell level, and multicellular level data analysis. Christina notes, "Getting acquianted with neuroscience methodology helped me understand the complexity of the system I am working on and helped me narrow my computational work towards experimentally testable targets. Personally interacting with our collaborators to combine perspectives from an engineering and a biological point of view led to new ideas and possible areas to further explore."