Week 1 - Ben Grodner

Museum of Modern Art

Summer is here! My fellow first years and I migrated to New York City last Saturday, and dove headfirst into the fabled clinical immersion. The first week is behind us and, pleasantly, reality seems to have lived up to the excitement. The upper east side of Manhattan is a great place to live especially when the commute to most of the hospitals is on the order of five minutes. Combine that with easy access to the best museums (see below), music, and theater in the world and there are few places I would rather be. My personal interactions with clinicians, researchers, and fellow students have been overwhelmingly positive. I have been impressed with the general passion and focus of the people involved in clinical research. The main difference in the attitude here is

Yay! Bench space.

a constant consciousness that your work is and should be for the benefit of others.

My mentors for the summer are Dr. Laura Donlin and Dr. Scott Rodeo, both of whom work at Hospital for Special Surgery. Dr. Donlin focuses on joint pathologies especially relating to rheumatoid arthritis, myositis, and joint infection. Her work leverages modern molecular biology techniques and computation to disentangle these complex diseases. Dr. Rodeo is a surgeon specializing in shoulder injuries and does research on soft tissue repair and regeneration. My plans with them for the summer focus on developing actionable avenues for collaboration with my lab in Ithaca (De Vlaminck lab).

In meetings with Dr. Donlin and Dr. Rodeo this week, I got a clearer idea of my direction for the summer: I will be developing a pipeline to prepare joint infection samples for analysis in Ithaca. My project in Ithaca is focused on spatially mapping microbes in situ with phylogenetic resolution, which is a technique that will be useful in studying joint infections. Current methods for studying and diagnosing joint infections are quite limited and the project has several exciting possibilities. Now that I am oriented, I am looking forward to beginning my shadowing with Dr. Rodeo through surgeries and patient interactions.