This summer, I’m interning at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. They aim to create an open database of information about the brain, one of their most well-known projects is trying to make a map of the brain, or a connectome. The connectome would have all the neurons of the brain and their synapses (connections) mapped out. Currently, the only organism whose connectome is fully reconstructed is the roundworm C. elegans. Parts of the mouse brain have also been mapped out, which is what some people at Allen are working on. We have a long way to go!

This is the building! It’s 6 floors high, with both wet lab and computational research going on.

I’m living in a studio next to UW, so I’m going to be taking the bus to and from work every day. We’re provided with an unlimited Orca card to use for bus fares, which is really nice 🙂

I’m going to be performing simulations to electrically stimulate neurons this summer.The eventual goal is to understand more about deep brain stimulation as we move from single-cell simulations to networks simulations. I’m pretty excited and looking forward to the rest of summer!