m13-olgaagerskov-blog

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[m13-olgaagerskov-blog]

Last day in the office, time for reflections

When you embark on a new journey you don’t know what to expect. But you dream big, and dreaming big also requires sometimes that you make big decisions. Like decide that you are going to fly half across the world and stay there alone to work in a completely new field that you are attracted to but know little about.

That is exactly what happened with me. I made some hard decisions, did a lot of planning (took a long time!) and I exchanged being part time office assistant and college student for staying in a big university environment, enjoying (and sometimes hating) Australian summer and learning what does it mean to be a scientist.

This internship means a lot to me. I got a chance to feel that I am learning exactly what I wanted to know - is the job of a scientist something for me? With all my passion for nutrition, human health and food science, would I live up to tasks like rigorous laboratory work and conducting research? I have learnt that this work requires a great amount of patience and focus, but most importantly passion for your field. You can always make mistakes and learn from them, repeat your experiment, rewrite one sentence in your scientific paper 5 times to make it right, but you need to enjoy your work, otherwise you better look for something else.

I am satisfied that time spent here answered my questions and I am more aware now of who I am and what is going to be my next step. I know what I have to do next and I believe that it the most important part of the internships that we take as students at Metropol University College, Copenhagen, that we do some practical work to learn more about ourselves, our strengths and things that we still need to work on.

My work during the internship sparked an interest in me in trying to find out how can we help women in perinatal period to achieve the best possible pregnancy outcomes. There are many ways we can do it. One of them is by designing research that will investigate new substances that have the potential for gestational diabetes prevention, another is to do the practical work with women in terms of educational sessions, counseling. I can definitely see myself doing both. First researching what we already know that works in terms of diet and exercises, then we can design an intervention. There is always room for improvement when it comes to achieving better pregnancy outcomes. I was even considering that I could change my idea for BA thesis, and work with problem areas such as how to improve pregnancy outcomes in lower income communities or how to educate about the importance of breastfeeding. As I have learnt here, you can’t underestimate the importance of women’s metabolic health status in the pre-concention period for future pregnancy outcomes and child's metabolic health. Women who are obese have higher chance of various pregnancy related complications and having a child with macrosomia who will have a higher chance of becoming obese person and developing diabetes later in life. Simple interventions like diet counseling of pregnant women at every prenatal meetings and use of specific probiotic strains show to be useful and effective in preventing child from become obese later in life. I have many ideas now how I myself can help these women and their offspring. I will start with writing my thesis, and later - who knows! Inspiration from internship can help you create your future job! :)

Have a great day everybody, thank you for reading this and goodbye Australia!!

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This is a great story which I found relevant to what I am doing in my internship! In my research I learned a lot about the science behind the importance of breastfeeding and that education really works to raise the rates of breastfeeding! The benefits for the future health of the baby are immense! Breastfeeding awareness is something that I definitely want to personally involve myself in! 

World Breastfeeding week

The last week was “World Breastfeeding week”. The campaign has the goal to shift the attitudes towards breastfeeding in societies in order to optimize the development, health of future generations.

In Colombia, especially in poor urban area like in Barranquilla, exclusive breastfeeding is not practiced a lot. There are several factors affecting this: 

1. Economy (a lot of these women have to work, and most of the times, it’s not possible to bring your baby or get home to feed him/her)

2. Lack of knowledge (many mothers are unaware of the benefits for them and for their baby and are unable to cite the risks associated with not breastfeeding)

3. Moreover, many people, believe that because commercially prepared formula has been enhanced in recent years, infant formula is equivalent to breast milk in terms of its health benefits.

4. The perceived inconvenience of breastfeeding is also an issue.

Just to mention a few..

Increasing the time mothers spend with their infants is difficult. But if mothers are made more aware of the maternal benefits, an increasing number might insist on being the main caregiver and take care of their children for longer periods of time.

My team and I, developed some activities related to the theme for the mothers. The activities were all games, with the goal to raise discussions, and to make them share knowledge and experiences.

First game was to make them aware of the benefits: under most off the chairs the women were sitting on, a little note with a benefit of breastfeeding was pasted. Then they were asked to find the note and read it out loud, then talk about their own experience, some of the benefits were new to them, and others they knew already. At the end of the game, they shared other benefits and stories about breastfeeding.

It worked really well, and they all participated and were very eager to share and very alert, on our additional informations about the issue.

The second game we developed was a quiz, formed as a roulette, they had one ball handed out, and they had to pass it on, when the roulette was rolling, and when it stopped the person who had the ball had to get up, and get a question. 

The women were not all eager to get up and to stand in front of the crowd..

But this made it quite funny when the ball was passing around in the crowd.. ;-)

The questions were made to reduce misperceptions about breastfeeding, and to start dialogues about breastfeeding.

Some of these women have a very low educational level, some of them are extremely young (14-15 years), or are illiterate, and many of them loose concentration if they are not actively involved. 

Studies show that games can aid learning through positive associations, and with fun challenges. By confronting a problem before any learning takes place, students are able to contextualize new knowledge instead of simply hearing stand-alone facts. We used minimal intervention from us as teachers to help the mothers incorporate the lesson more quickly.

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My learning objectives - how did I do?

This is my second last week of internship therefore I thought that I will start making evaluations of my time at Victoria University. Before you arrive to your internship place, you can “imagine” how it is going to be and what possibly you can learn from the chosen place. Therefore you make assumptions and write “learning objectives”. I believe I was lucky and fulfilled my learning objectives although in a completely different way than I imagined before!

Objective 1: Achieving an in-depth understanding of what is scientific method and how to apply it using different study designs.

Key strategies: 1.Participating in the existing study focusing on the improvement of the health and well-being of the studied community 2. Literature research

Comment: My time here has definitely taught me one thing that I really wanted to know: “what does it mean to be a researcher in the bio-medicine field”? Is it standing by the lab dishes measuring the content of antioxidants in food? Is it sitting in your office going through a ton or research trying to answer one question like e.g.: is saturated fat good for you or not? Is it going to conferences, talking to other scientist, collaborating with them, discussing, talking about the things you want to write about in your next paper? The answer is YES, YES and YES.

I had a unique opportunity to see how it looks from the inside from a perspective of somebody who does not have a training in bio medicine field or specific PhD research courses or lab training. Scientific method is applied to objectively get to the truth about the world. You form a hypothesis. Then you need to know what is already known about the subjects, do a lot of reading. Sometimes very difficult. Now that you know what are the gaps in the current knowledge, you can start your study design. Design your methods, divide your work. Or maybe you want to replicate already existing data to confirm the findings of some new discoveries? You can do that as well. I wasn’t here to design my own study but I could learn from other researchers what did they do? I had a chance to spend different days in different settings, in a lab and in the office, with different people. It struck me immediately to see how independent a work of a scientist is. Yes, they do work in groups mostly, but I realized how much the work is based on your own passion, your drive to “design and do the whole work”. I had a chance to work with PhD students, whose work has to be very independent and looking at what they are doing and how that was overwhelming to see how inhumanely (!) focused you got to be :D Yes, you going to need these 3 years to finish your PhD, and everyday you do something to get to the finish line. So you don’t want to do something wrong on day 1, which will only be seen on day 457, realizing you have to like... hmm... start over! And you do keep making mistakes, you can‘t avoid it as it is a learning curve. Especially when you had to do with different machines and do things for the first time. Even when I was in the lab, I could see that even though we did all we could to get the best results from sds-page gels, there was no way to avoid the fact that part of it did not give us any usable reading. I was told that it might happen that you spend 10h in the lab and don't get any results on that day. And simply have to start over the next day. Lab work is a patience game, I tell you that! Apart from couple of ongoing projects I was also told about the local poor community of women who have the highest rates of gestational diabetes in Australia! That was my personal task! We found a middle ground between my personal interests in Human Microbiota and this group of women that I could help as a scientist. So I embarked on my own supervised but highly independent project, making a report on how can we help them. Is there any evidence that altering gut microbiota in pregnancy and in early age will improve their metabolic health? I begin to try to answer this question. And that helped me to learn more about what it means to write a proper review article, that further can be used as a base for clinical practice. Of course more research is ALWAYS needed, but its a start :)

Objective 2: Improving my skills in the research data analysis

Key strategies: 1. Working with given tasks regarding data analysis

Comments: In the first two weeks of my internship I got a big pack of data that had to be analyzed and presented in an understandable way. Graphs, charts... You think its easy until you actually have to do it... As I already mentioned in one of my previous posts I am proud to say that my analysis was used to present the “Health Education“ project for the funding agency so that they support us with their money to continue the project. My evaluation showed that the Health education classes are indeed helping the poor community in the area and that money are well spent investing in teaching people basic cooking skills and nutrition.

Objective 3:

Gaining better understanding of the biomedical research environment and ethical considerations that must be followed when working with human subjects.

Key strategies: 1. Observation of the environment and team dynamics 2. Collaboration with other professionals

Comments:

1. I didn’t have much contact with human subjects but I did participate for a short time in a research where I could join a team to perform fitness and OGT tests. I had to read the ethics guidelines and could see how to interact with our participants in a professional manner.

Objective 4:

Learning how to search the literature to gain knowledge about the state of the art methods appropriate for the research task at hand.

Key strategies: 1. Search the available literature through the appropriate channels.

That was my teeth grinding task! State of the art. What is already know on the subject. That was the beginning of my project for poor women and human microbiota. I���ve spend a lot of time searching for the literature and discussing it with my supervisor. One I thought now I finished this task, I was realizing I was wrong, and had to dig deeper. Apparently many undergraduate students are making a BIG mistake of reading a couple of papers and trying to get away with it thinking that now they know all about the subject. But I know now - there is ALWAYS more that you don’t know. And there is more to be learned. Pieces of the puzzles do not always look like they fit immediately. Therefore I must say. Patience and humility - what a great values to be exercised while being here.

It’s all for today, have a lovely day YOU - the awesome person who read this ;)

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Time is running fast, report must be finished soon!

As I already told you, I keep working on a report, which have to present the current evidence if alteration of gut microbiota in pregnancy and early in child's life can have long term impact on the child’s metabolic health.

In week 10 I am focusing on trying to finish this project, but it is not an easy task. I can tell you something about it. In the recent years there has been a lot of research going on to discover the role of human gut microbiota in maintaining our health and development of diseases. Human body contains 100 trillion microbial organisms in the gut, which is ten times more than somatic cells in the human body! It is becoming more and more recognized now, that “bacteria“ should not only be looked at as something causing diseases, but that there are trillions of bacteria living in our bodies who are crucial for our health, especially playing role in the early development of our immune system. Modern lifestyle unfortunately affects this fragile microbiota living in our guts. Elective c-sections, antibiotic exposures, diet low in fibre and high in fat, sedentary lifestyle, infant feeding method (breastfeeding vs. formula feeding). They all have impact on the development of our gut microbiota and they might play role in our metabolic health throughout our lives. From the literature review I found out, that we are able to help expectant mothers to take care of their child's health already in the womb, by applying particular probiotic treatments combined with dietary counseling. Certain probiotic strains contribute to better glucose control and are able to prevent gestational diabetes and large birth size, which is one of the risk factors for the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and obesity later in life. More research is urgently needed in this sector, but the probiotic effect on better glucose control has already been replicated in numerous studies, making it a prospective treatment for T2DM and gestational diabetes. Exciting new world is emerging for probiotic and gut health researchers! Evidence is already there, we just need to translate it into a proper treatment to aid people with weight loss and better glucose control in obesity and diabetes.

Stay tuned! Cheers!

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Hello! A least an incognito selfie could be taken to show it off to you guys :)

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Again not me in the photo, but this is pretty much how the set up looked like, with all the machines and vials. Photo source: http://www.prometheonpharma.com/technology/

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Oh sweet blueberry

In week 9 of my placement an interesting opportunity showed up to assist a scientist in the laboratory, learning how she is preparing samples for her study. Her research is about measuring the potential specific antioxidant activity in many different blueberry samples she was able to acquire. I didn’t even know you could get that many different kinds of commercial blueberries in Melbourne! So I was following the scientist in the looong step by step process of preparing the samples. I couldn't believe how long it took just to make them ready for being put into the analysis machine. We had to crash the frozen blueberries, treat them with liquid nitrogen, crash them some more, measure the weight carefully, leave them for the night into the dehydrator machine, then make the powder from the dehydrated samples , measure them again... no wait... I got lost..when did we centrifuge them? And add the methanol solution like 3 times in various concentration? There was couple of more steps in between, as we followed the agreed protocol. It was overwhelming for somebody without proper laboratory and chemistry training. Now I know much better what it takes to be a scientist and test food for their medicinal properties. I think the word PATIENCE written hundred times will expressed what I learned this weeks that is needed for laboratory work.

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Please note I am not allowed to take photos during the ongoing trials, so in the photo you can see an example of how the VO2max test looked like - but my participants had couple of more electrodes connected to them to monitor the heart! Photo taken from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhSbn7RNvIo

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Real humans, real data

Hello guys!

At week 8 of my internship my supervisor got me into contact with a researcher who is conducting a study involving human participants, so that I can get exposure to more aspects of research. Of course everything has to fall according to ethics code so I got cleared to assist the researcher in her contact with participants. The great part about this experience was to learn how to conduct an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test and VO2max fitness test on some really complicated machines here at uni! One participant could not do both tests at once so one person had to come at two different days of the week. Glucose test took a lot of time, we had to take blood 4 times of one person. Fitness test was shorter but gosh, just to connect the person to all the electrodes in the machine took 30 min! Then the machine itself and the computer system had to be calibrated to the person. A cardio physiologist had to be present at all times to monitor our participants as they were “giving it all out”, and people recruited had to be over 55! One 60yo women have been so fit that she made me feel embarrassed about my own fitness level! She would beat me in a bike race without an effort! Pff! But that is what I like about Melbourne - the city is obsessed with fitness! Many people here look like they’d just came back from the gym. City promotes physical activity and from school years children are encouraged that fit = better = healthier. Of course there are always problems on the lower steps of the social class ladder. And these are the people I am targeting with my review paper I have to deliver to my supervisor soon. I will tell you more about my paper once I finish it! I am still collecting the data now! See you later!

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Happy New Year from Sydney!

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Slowly getting back to work after amazing Christmas

So it happened. My dream came true. I had a week off during Christmas time (my internship is officially 13 weeks long, 14 Nov 2016 to 12 Feb 2017, including a week off for Christmas.) and I went to Sydney to see the fireworks at the famous Sydney Harbor Bridge! Gosh, what a bonus of being here in Australia. Kangaroos, koalas, crazy weather from heavy storms to excruciating sun in one day and now amazing New Year’s fireworks in Sydney. Adventure it is! Shame my week off ended quickly and I came back to work quickly. I had to work from home in week 1, because university was not officially open until the 9th, but no worries, I had enough tasks that would fill up entire year! I had an agreement with my supervisor to work from home on my paper and simply being in mail contact with him when I need him. So no meetings, no presentations or lab work in week 1, only my review that is growing bigger and bigger! But no worries, I am getting some exciting stuff scheduled for week 2, not sure yet if its lab work or assisting a researcher in his physical activity trials. Will find out soon!

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Christmas time soon, but there is so much to do!

Week before Christmas was very busy, as I had to meet agreed deadlines when writing my paper. I must say it: the longer I work on my review the more difficult it gets. There are parts that I keep rewriting because my writing style is not good enough yet. Sometimes I feel hopeless and feel like I am hitting the wall. This is when I send my paper to my supervisor, every 2-3 days, and we take a look at it. I read tons of papers on the given subjects and it started to get complicated - trying to answer the original question. I know that this is how it is supposed to work - this is how you learn. So I don’t give up. I try again and hope it’s much better this time. I start to feel more and more the lack of scientific basis I have. I get to read papers in biochemistry and nutrition and have to look up many of the concepts that are there. I am happy I do it as I can learn, but it’s frustrating at times as it takes a lot of time sometimes just to read one paper. Anyways, this week I was almost all week in the office working on my paper. Happily on Friday I also got a chance to go to a presentation one PhD student made to explain how he is going to conduct his research. he is going to study the impact of HIIT on subject’s body depending on his (only men subjects) diet. These little things - presentation here, meeting there - I feel that they are really making a difference for me. I really feel like I am a staff member at the university and get to work in the field. It might be just the beginning - but hey - what a beginning it is!

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Wish I was standing there presenting!

Last week was very exciting! I spent 1 day at a Dietetics conference, 3 days in the office writing my review and 1 day in the lab assisting a PhD student further with his analysis ! Conference took place on Wednesday. It was a very long day where various speakers were giving short presentations regarding research that they have conducted or are currently conducting. Topics were very different, from public health issues such as limiting the availability of sugar sweetened beverages in schools to specialized topics in molecular biology. Arena was mostly given to scientist at the early stage of their carrier but 2 key-note speakers from Monash University and Sydney University were also present to give lecturer. Listening to them speaking I was thinking that I would like to be in their place presenting findings from my own PhD research - as much as I am afraid of public speaking! The day ended with a common dinner and ending ceremony where prices were given to the best students for their presentation! Thursday I spend in a laboratory, continuing the observation of the trails, where student is trying to determine how to lessen the allergenicity of prawns, which are one of the most common animal food source here in Australia ! We have been using method called sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) to denature the proteins that we previously extracted. What a lengthy process to work in the lab. I was told that sometimes you might spend entire day working in the lab and due completely unforeseen circumstances, the work you have done for 8h turns out to bring zero results and you have to repeat the experiment all over again. And that is normal! Wow. Everything requires precision so you cannot apply half measures, either you take your time making sure everything is under control or you don’t even walk into the lab! (And don’t forget your gloves, lab coat and safety glasses for your own protection.) Week was eventful and I hope all the rest of my stay will be equally successful !

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Science! Easy, right? Or...right?

This week has been definitely a challenge to me as I more and more realize what does it take to produce a reliable scientific writing. 4 out or 5 days I spent doing research and working further on my Minireview, which becomes harder and harder then further I get. Even though I am not conducting clinical trials that need to be reported (and that requires a separate PhD course!) trying to investigate what is the current evidence that certain prospective clinical practices might be useful become to be a horribly difficult task, mainly because my subject has not yet been well studied in the biomed field. Turns out my writing style is rather on a low level when it comes to proper “writing flow” and understandable reporting of literature findings. It was very disappointing in the beginning to see that it’s a long way ahead of me in terms of my writing skills, but I am very grateful that all I write is being read and commented on, which gives me a great opportunity to develop these missing skills :)  Thursday this week I’ve spend in the laboratory observing a PhD student writing his theses about how could we potentially decreases the allergenicity of prawns :) He is at the early stage of sample collection therefore my lab visit resembled a cooking class in the beginning as we had to prepare prawns for protein extraction by applying different cooking methods. Haha, prawn cooked in a lab flask anybody?

I am sorry I am not able to provide any pictures of my lab visits, but ethics does not allow me for it. I will try to get some photos next week as my supervisor got me an access to a one day dietetics conference (sponsored by danish Novo Nordisk here in Melbourne :D ) Have a great week everybody!

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“An insider’s” diary

Hello there! This week apart from keep working on my Review, I had a chance to observe some laboratory work several times and sit in a room with a scientist panel who were judging the work progress of a PhD student and had to receive critique to be able to move forward with his research. First of course I wasn’t allowed into the laboratory room before I read some procedure manual and what to do in case of any issues :) I was watching the work of one of the PhD students, conducting her research into the fatty acid composition of muscles of mice, who were fed different chow.  I had no idea research takes such a looong time! Its the third year she is working on this project and its only now she could extract the DNA from muscle tissue to analyse. Wow! Another interesting activity this week was being invited by my supervisor to a presentation done by one of his PhD student, where he had to describe and defend his PhD project which is at an early stage of data collection. It was really interesting first to hear what he is working on - the use on native australian aboriginal plants to help aboriginal community fight the high prevalence of diabetes, and how he plans to do it! Then the expert panel was critiquing his ideas and giving him advice on how to improve the research process. So that is what a beginner scientist have to go through! :) Truly stressful but if you are passionate about your project it’s a really important step towards producing a good papers out of your research. Hope one day that will be me!