Winter 2023
Intersecting Academics, Research, and Policy
Classes:
PHYS 115/118: General Physics II (with Lab)
SPH 481: Ethics, Social Justice, and Policy in Public Health
NEUSCI 301: Introduction to Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
BIOC 405: Introduction to Biochemistry
Beginnings in the Neuro Major
NEUSCI 301
Although much of my time in college has been devoted to advocating for publicly accessible and understandable neuroscience education in Grey Matters Journal, it is still easy at times to be intimidated by what we are actually able to do in the field. That’s why I appreciated the lab opportunities provided in this class so much. My favorite experiment was focused on analyzing the action potentials (or electrical signals) traveling down the nerves of a live earthworm via extracellular recording on electrodes at either end of the worm. I can’t explain in words the amazement or satisfaction of getting real life recordings from these labs, seeing what I read about in textbooks on my screen from an experiment. Furthermore, these labs taught me some incredible resilience, as writing lab reports throughout this quarter have been some of the most difficult things I have done throughout my years in college, which is why the final product of this lab report was so special to me. It also reminded me of the applicability of coding within different contexts, as demonstrated by the visualizations I created to go along this report.
Neuroscience was surely a theme throughout this quarter, with my next project being focused on my electricity and magnetism physics class. I would argue that this was the best possible class I could have taken concurrently with NEUSCI 301 as it perfectly lined up with electrophysiology concepts that I didn’t previously expect. More specifically, we learned in NEUSCI 301 that neurons act like real life wire circuits, with ion channels/concentrations/flow on either side of the membrane acting as resistors and capacitors in a current. However, when we learned this I barely understood what a capacitor was until we covered it in PHYS 115. As such, I decided to expand this knowledge further in a website under the supervision of Professor Usama al-Binni, linking the neural mechanisms of neuroscience to the boundaries of physics. The parallels that I found between these two fields was incredible to learn about myself, and I hope that this resource can continue to help future physics and neuroscience students understand the fascinating interdisciplinary connections in what they are studying.
Physics in Neuroscience
PHYS 115
Check out the website at https://brandonwu574.wixsite.com/physics-in-neuroscie
Advocating for Health Policy
SPH 481
If there is anything that I have learned from the public health sequence, it is that much of the problems we have in modern health are inevitably a result of decisions made by its leadership. This is why I appreciated having this class on health policy analysis, enabling me to connect my studies more to real life events. Throughout this quarter, I worked in a team of undergraduates to analyze a specific real life policy bill, in our case SB 5009, which if passed would require parental approval before a student receives comprehensive sexual health education. While we all had strong feelings about this bill, our objective was to analyze this in a non-partisan fashion, presenting only factual and relevant information so that policymakers would theoretically be able to read this brief and have the facts to make a proper decision with their constituents in mind. We were able to analyze a broad range of multidisciplinary aspects from economic impact, ethical implications, and social justice related consequences.