Caltech

Au Revoir!

Hello, hello!

I am finally back across the Atlantic and one hurricane later, I've moved into my [very tiny] apartment here in NYC and started my first week of graduate school at Weill, Cornell's biomedical sciences campus on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It's been such a dramatic change from moving to Zurich from LA, and now to New York City: three extremely diverse, beautiful, and completely different cities.

Before I left Switzerland, I said goodbye to an incredible group of friends and fellow scientists who gave me a wonderful experience at a place that I'll never forget. I miss the park outside my window, the greenery and nature that surrounded every part of the city, the trains/trams that ran so often and efficiently, the colorful Swiss francs [though not the grocery store prices], even the swans - and the peacefulness of it all.

I've been so blessed to spend my summer abroad at a place that I never dreamed I would have ended up at. I'm definitely looking forward to visiting again one day, whether for a postdoc or a conference, or for a vacation.

My last week and a half in Europe was spent in Vienna and the French Riviera. I'm a huge classical music fan [after being in Caltech's chamber music program for the past four years] and I knew I wanted to visit Vienna to look at the opera house and all of the historical museums there. I've also taken French classes since middle school and wanted to put that learning to good use, so I decided to travel to Southern France [and it was closer/easier to get to from Zurich]. And someday, Paris :)

Vienna was amazing and I certainly got my fill of architecture:

The most famous museums were the Schonbrunn, the Belvedere, the Imperial Apartments [where each of the royal families had their own silverware, golden candlesticks, and plate settings... I was sick of plates and candlesticks after going through at least 5 rooms of them!], and the Museum of Fine Arts.

I also got to visit Prater Park with its famous ferris wheel, Mozart's house, and took a tour of the Opera House:

After two days in Vienna, I hopped on a train through Milan to Nice [bad idea]. Never again will I take TrenItalia... not only are the trains always late by at least half an hour, they are also very badly air-conditioned. It was like being in a sauna for 4 hour increments: first from Zurich to Milan, Milan to Ventimiglia, and Ventimiglia to Nice.

To sum up the French Riviera in August: Warm. It was at least 85 degrees outside every day, with bright sun and beaches; and also the colors of the city were all of reds, oranges and yellows. There were plenty of outdoor markets selling soaps, lavender, fresh fruit and candies, as well as flowers and various trinkets.

Note: The beaches in Nice are very, very rocky... so much that they hurt. A trip to Antibes, the setting of Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, proved that there are actually sandier beaches on the coast.

Antibes was built as a fortress on the sea, and the town is still walled within the stone towers and lined with cobblestone. It's about half an hour by train from Nice, and Monaco is about the same distance in the opposite direction. There is a huge pier filled with sailing boats and charter yachts, and a climb up to the top of a park gives a great view of the coastline:

Also: PALM TREES! I miss California!

I spent the days reading French, speaking French, eating French, falling in love with the French all over again. Then on the return trip, I missed my connection Zurich in Milan [because the trains were so late!] but managed to get a replacement ticket to Bern with a transfer in Arth-Goldau... but because the Swiss train was a few minutes late, we didn't make it to Arth-Goldau in time and so had to get on another train to Zug, and then to Zurich. By that time, it was already past midnight and on a weekend, so the trains had stopped running once we arrived at the main station. I had to take a [very, very expensive] taxi back to my dorm room, but what else could you have done - definitely getting a night of sleep at your place is safer than staying at a train station until morning. The next day was spent packing up all of my belongings into two suitcases and flying off to JFK. And here I am.

So that, my dear readers, concludes my tale of adventures on the other side of the ocean. It has been a summer of a lifetime and I've throughly enjoyed all of it - can you believe that time flies so fast? It seems that it was only a few days ago that I had just moved to Zurich, encountered everything I had to deal with, and was missing home - now it's just the pictures and memories that remain.

Make the best of the time that you have, wherever you are and whoever you are with. I promise that life will take you far and to the places of your dreams.

Au revoir,

D

Viva Italia!

I didn't think that I would have the time (or the means) to travel to Italy, though it is pretty close to Switzerland - because I'd heard that it wasn't the safest place to be a tourist in, and the train ticket was pretty expensive. But it turns out that the Swiss embassy gave us a three-day pass to travel around the country, and we'd only used up two to get to/from Bern. So I had an extra day left, and a postdoc in the lab was going back home to Milan and invited me along!

Martin, his brother Manuel, and sister Eliza live back home with their parents in a small town near Chiasso, which is on the border between Switzerland and Italy. It's also about a half hour drive to Milan, which was a day trip for us. They took me around the city, eating pizza and gelato along the way, and I marveled at the architecture of the catherdals and other buildings. Most awe-inspiring is il duomo di Milano: construction began in the late 1300's and was completed almost 600 years later.

During that span of time, people such as Shelley, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Napoleon Bonaparte (who was crowned King of Italy at the Duomo), da Vinci... all walked through/climbed the cathedral.

There are over 2200 statues covering the outside of the cathedral, and each is so intricately carved. Climbing up the stairs to the top leads to a view of the entire city, overlooking the courtyard of the palace. At the very top of the spire is a golden Madonna.

It was a bit unfortunate that the towers were being renovated and polished when we visited, but it was still a great sight. There were massive pillars holding the building structure up inside, along with beautiful floor to ceiling stained glass windows with vibrant colors.

Next to Il Duomo was the Galleria, filled with restaurants and shops underneath the arched roof. It connected the cathedral to La Scala, the world famous opera house with a statue of da Vinci in front:

I loved the architecture and streets of Italy, which was completely different that what I usually see in Switzerland. I also wish I could speak Italian - I picked up on a little bit because it is somewhat similar to French, but as Italians don't quite like to speak English, I was lucky to have my host family of the weekend with me!

The next day was spent in the Italian countryside, visiting the farms and horses - I learned how to drive stick-shift in a mini-Cooper and Manuel taught me how to drive his motorcycle (though only with two gears!). The food was amazing: homemade carbonara, roast beef, fried potatoes, lasagna - I ate to my heart's content. We also visited a bookstore and Martin wanted English books so I loaded him up with Wilde, Fitzgerald, Doyle, Defoe, Huxley, and Steinbeck: shopping, photos, good food, and books. A perfect weekend.

 

Lucerne, the City of Lights

I was so, so lucky to be able to see my best friend in Zurich a few weeks ago as a stop on her family's European summer trip - one thing that I'm very thankful for from Caltech is the support groups and friends that I've made and kept. Maybe it's true that you have to choose two between work, play, and sleep; but choosing people will most often be the most rewarding. When you look back on times like these and the four (!!! yes, four) years that have passed, I do remember the long and painful nights with my 5 hour finals and staying up for those impossibly long sets - but fresher in my memory is the laughter and adventures with friends. People often remark that I take a ton of pictures, and to that I reply: better more than less. You can always delete the extras, but think of how you'd feel if you had to say - I wish I could go back and capture that moment.

Also about Caltech: you don't quite realize how sharp you are and the training that we get until you start working at a different place. No matter what subject matter we're taking classes or majoring in, it's become engrained in us how to learn and how to pick up on things very quickly. In time it becomes natural for us to come up with the questions to ask, the hypotheses to test, the follow up experiments to carry out - the way of thinking about science is invaluable. Two months in a lab setting is hardly any time to make progress, but my PI and postdocs are very happy with the amount of work and experimental data analysis that has been completed. Coming here has a scientific learning and an exploratory/cultural aspect; I definitely feel that I have accomplished much of both!

I visited Luzern (also spelled Lucerne) at the end of last month because I was actually told by a potential PI at Weill to take a trip there. The train ride to Luzern takes about an hour, and the main station there was also impressive in structure and style. It opens to the beautiful lake and the downtown streets of the city, and the weather was perfect (at least for the first day I was there). The Chapel Bridge, built in the 1300’s and next to a water tower (first a dungeon, then a treasury, and apparently now it is a club room) is one of the most famous relics of Luzern. On the roof of the bridge hangs a series of paintings about the history of the city; in 1993 a large part of the bridge was burnt down due to an accidental fire, and so only a few of the original paintings were saved.  

The fortress and walls of the city still stand, you can climb up to the guard towers and see a panoramic view of Luzern and the lake. Most moving of all is the Lion Monument, carved to commerate the brave regiment of Swiss soldiers who died in the French Revolution in 1792 (the inscription reads Helvetiorum Fedei Ac Viruti: "To the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss"); Mark Twain calls it the "the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world."

The next day was Sunday, and being as fickle as Switzerland's weather is, it was pouring by noon. We had planned to explore the city a bit more, but ended up being stuck in the train station until our train left at 2 pm (another thing about Europe - people are on 24 hr time. I'm just about used to typing 14:00 by now). But that is part of traveling: being able to accept things/the weather for what they are and learning how to be flexible with plans!

The Bern Bears

About two weeks ago, ThinkSwiss put together a weekend retreat for the fellowship grantees plus some of the students at the summer school at EPFL. The agenda was as follows: meet at the main train station in Bern at 9:30 am on Friday, spend that day in the city and bus up to a hotel in Interlaken. On Saturday, we would head up to Jungfraujoch, where the tallest tram station in Europe was in the Swiss Alps - and boasted views of the German Black Forest and Switzerland.

Friday was bright and sunny, and promised a wonderful time in Bern. The train ride was about an hour from Zurich, and I arrived a bit early but found some of the students in the entrance to the station pretty easily: just look for the group where everyone is speaking fluent English! Our official guide came to meet us and took us to the Swiss embassy for a briefing and Q&A session with the two administrative heads of the Fulbright fellowship in Switzerland and ambassadors/diplomats. After lunch, we had some free time to explore the city and the views, of course, were gorgeous:

Bern is the capital of Switzerland, but is only the fourth largest city (after Zurich, Basel, and Geneva... maybe Lausanne by now?). The seal of the city is a bear because of local legend: the Duke that founded Bern said that he would name it after the first animal that he hunted down, which turned out to be a bear. The city has had bear pits since the 16th century, and you can see mother bear with her two cubs in one enclosure:

On Saturday, we were off to the Swiss Alps! The journey from our hotel took four hours to get to the top of the mountain: first, a bus to the train station, then three trams and transfers on different lines to Jungfraujoch. The temperature outside dropped steadily as we climbed up the mountain on the railroad tracks... most of us didn't even have winter jackets because we thought we were going to enjoy European weather during the summer!

There was snow and ice when we stepped out of the last station, and we spent a few hours exploring the sights. Unfortunately because of the falling snow, we were unable to see clearly across the mountains, but we had fun with the winter weather anyways. As I mentioned in a previous post, Andy Downard is working at CERN for his fellowship, and he was able to contact a research scientist working at the observatory. The few of us that were hanging out with him came along for the tour, and we were able to see where the weather forecasts were calculated and the atmospheric measurement equipment at the top of the mountain!

I definitely froze that day... but the views and experience were so worth it. Now all I have to do is come back some year in the wintertime to go skiing in the Alps :)

Zürich and Winterthur

There is so much to do in this city, which is the largest in Switzerland (though not the capital - that is Bern). Most known is Bahnhofstrasse, the main shopping street with all of the designers in line, which starts from the entrance of the main train station. Zurich HB reminds me of Grand Central, though not nearly as elaborate, but has trains that run regionally and internationally: the TGV to Paris runs through here, and so does TrenItalia to Milan and Rome.

 

Walking straight down Bahnhofstrasse takes you to a large flea market on Saturday mornings and early afternoons at the edge of the lake. Crossing the street to the piers will give you an amazing shot of the lakeside and the ferries that dock nearby, as well as a horizon of mountains and sailboats on the water. Turn around and you will get a clear picture of the river running through the city with the Grossmunster church on one side, and the Fraumunster on the other. I climbed the Grossmunster stairs (a steep, spiral stone staircase that went up for about five minutes) and the view of the city from above was well worth the effort:

My second weekend in Zurich, I decided to take a trip to the Rhinefalls - the largest plains waterfall in Europe. The trip from Zurich HB to Winterthur took a lot longer than I expected because I also had to transfer from the train to a smaller tram. There were rolling hills, hay stacks in the field, sunflowers in the farm country, and all sorts of peaceful scenery passing by my window. Arriving at the Schloss Laufen am Rhinefall stop, you have to climb to the top of the viewing tower, by ticket to access the stairs down, and then make your way down the hill to the side of the falls. Though I bought a ticket, someone had jammed the turnstile when I arrived at the gated stairs so that everyone could pass through - oh, tourists. The falls were immensely powerful and there were boats from the other side of the river that brought people to the rocks in the middle of the water - I can imagine that there would be a lot of drenched people up there!

 

 

Think[like the]Swiss

Happy Swiss National Day!

It's definitely not as big as the 4th of July in the States, but not surprisingly all the shops are closed in the city and people are having picnics and swimming in the river in town. I'm definitely glad to have the day off because I just came back from a weekend in the Milan and the Italian countryside - today is for resting, catching up on some things, and sleeping early :)

A bit more on the research I am working on here: the fellowship that I have is from the Swiss embassy through an organization called ThinkSwiss. Their mission is to foster the exchange of science and culture between the States and Switzerland, and they have multiple programs for all different types of majors: a summer school for biological sciences (BUSS), the ThinkSwiss research scholarship for undergraduate and graduate students, a vision and sports series, and even an architectural program! They're also at separate locations in the country: EPFL Lausanne, Bern, Zurich, and Basel. The communication between the interns in charge of the program at the embassy and the scholars is very open and smooth. I've had no problem contacting them about my application, travel arrangements, and other tips on getting to Switzerland. If they don't know themselves, they'll let you know the best way to find what you need (ie where to look for housing within the area, etc).

The application is very straightforward: a transcript, an essay on your scholarly merits and about how you can serve as a student ambassador, one reference letter and a letter from a PI accepting you into their university group. You also have to blog for ThinkSwiss at least twice during your stay, but that is no problem: I wrote that I love photography and have blogging experiences already! So far I think it's a wonderful program - it gives students the opportunity to do research abroad and not only to learn science from a different scholarly standpoint, but in an entirely new environment as well. I never thought I would get the scholarship, but I'm so glad that I did because it provided the means and the chance for me to explore the world; it's something that I will never forget for the rest of my life.

The past weekend, ThinkSwiss took the scholars on a trip to Bern and Interlaken. Since I was going to Europe for the summer, I only brought summer clothes and a few jackets... talk about being unprepared for the snow! We took Friday to see the city of Bern, got a talk and short information session at the embassy and the Swiss Parliament, and then headed up to the mountain of Jungfraujoch on Saturday. It was definitely snowing like crazy when we got up there; don't let the smiling pictures fool you because it was freezing! I am also here with Andy Downard, a Caltech grad student studying physics at CERN for this summer; we actually went on the science policy DC trip together! Techers are everywhere :) Because of his studies, he was able to phone a researcher at the observatory and we got to go up to see where the weather forecasts and atmospheric measurements were made.

One thing I have gotten used to here is that everywhere in Switzerland is beautiful - we have come to expect no less. Even my desk space in lab is ridiculously neat and surrounded by greenery:

The research I am involved with here is different from what I've done before at Caltech or any other university. My PI, Jay Siegel, is working primarily in organic chemistry and synthesis. The professor I work more closely with, Ehud Landau, is a specialist in lipid cubic phases: there are two main purposes that these are synthesized for -  prebiotic chemistry and drug delivery methods. Prebiotic chemistry deals with hypothesizing how life/cells originated and developed. Marek, the post-doc who is working on this project, is using l.c.p.s that are modified for DNA binding and studying the specific strands of DNA that may interact with them. Yazmin, another post-doc, and Silvan, an apprentice about my age, work more on the chemistry side of things. The lipid phases can also be modified with photochemical compounds that will release certain molecules if activated by a laser. There is a lot of preparation and synthesis before actual experiments can be set up: in my first week, I made a batch of l.c.p.s, synthesized a derivative of thymidine, ran two columns, purified compounds, ran NMRs and lots of UV-vis spectra. Right now we're working up the reactions and are in the middle of diffusion experiments to see if binding occurs with different complementary/non-complementary/sized strands of DNA.

The research environment is also different here: I really like the work style, the group of people that are in the lab (we're so international: from Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Germany, Italy...) have lunch together, celebrate birthdays together, just come over and chat in the afternoons - it is a good atmosphere to be a scientist in. They work very hard but are genuinely nice and helpful about everything, and have included me in all the things that the lab group does. Cultural exchange is everywhere: stories are told about growing up in different countries, what life is like here in Switzerland, and I'm picking up on a bit of Swiss German and have used a bit of French (mainly to read things at the grocery store, where ingredients are written in German and French).

More on Zurich/Italy/traveling a bit later - off to sleep because I'll be waking up early for work tomorrow!

Grüezi from Switzerland!

Hello again!!

If you've been keeping up with the Caltech blogs over some period of time, you might remember me from the Caltech Y Science Policy trip to Washington D.C. about two years ago. Has it really been that long?? Time flies! I can't believe I just graduated a month ago - yes, four years went by fast.

photo cred: Larissa Yee :)

Kids, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and you will get there soon too. At least sooner than you think - I used to feel the days dragging by, but senior year went by like a whirlwind because of 1. grad school applications, 2. visiting grad schools and thus never being on campus during winter term, and 3. trying to get my fill of LA in terms of places and food before I left. Also took a fabulous beach trip to San Diego for a few days after finals week! Side note: I REALLY MISS CALIFORNIA....

Around spring break I thought about what I wanted to do for the summer; though home is nice, I wanted to explore a bit and/or take some rest. Turns out that I have done plenty of the former and hardly any of the latter... I was basically set to rotate in a lab for the summer at Weill Cornell, where I'm currently enrolled in their neuroscience PhD program. I fell in love with New York City (yes, their biomedical and translational life sciences campus is in NYC on the Upper East Side... and not the main campus in Ithaca!) and the people/program when I visited, and now this California girl is moving to the east coast! Anyways, so I had plans to move over there around the beginning of July, settle in and get acquainted with the city, and pick up some more lab skills so I could familiarize myself before school started.

On a whim, I applied to a research fellowship in Switzerland - I'd never been to Europe before, and thought that it was worth a shot in a dark. Actually, the process went somewhat like this: 'Hi Harry!!! (my advisor). I found a scholarship to do research in Switzerland, except we have to find a professor to work for (part of the application was for the PI to write you a letter accepting you to the unversity/lab group). Do you know anyone over there?'

Harry replies, 'Here's Jay! (and cc's his colleague in the email) He's the head of the Organic Chemistry Institute at the University of Zurich, get in touch!' After a few rounds of emails, I was set... and though I wasn't a chemist by any means, Dr. Siegel told me to come on over anyways! I suppose now I can add chemist to the resume. It's really interesting how far a general science degree can take you from Caltech. I did a SURF on campus my freshman summer in biochemistry, continued a bit of protein work at UC Berkeley the year after that, and last summer Amgen funded my SRTP at UCSF in anesthesia/ultrasound/fluid dynamics work. When I got the ''Congratulations! You have been accepted..'' email in late April, I was floored. I never imagined that I would actually be overseas for the summer! I had to scramble to find housing near Zurich, email the Weill professors my apologies for not coming over the summer (and got a recommendation to go to Lucerne for a trip), book my flight, figure out how to pack in order to move to Switzerland and then straight to New York... it was a terribly hectic time.

My family came for my commencement ceremony and we packed up/drove home immediately afterwards. The following Tuesday, we were on a plane to New York and saw relatives/went sightseeing for a day before I was on a plane from JFK to Zurich. Crazy story: I almost missed my flight due to horrendous Manhattan traffic and a wrong turn out of the Lincoln tunnel. I had to check my second suitcase because they told me it was too heavy, after I had run to the ticketing counter. A girl who came up five minute after me wasn't allowed on the plane because she hadn't checked in the night before. I sprinted through the airport and security, and literally ran onto the plane before they closed the doors. Talk about frazzled! I also hadn't eaten dinner, but SwissAir is wonderful and fed us. But that wasn't the worst of it. I landed in Zurich not knowing an ounce of Swiss-German. I had found a sublet from a student in a dorm in a town that was about a 20 minute train ride from the center of the city, but I had no idea how to get there (I also was too confused to find a tourist information center, it seemed). Someone bought a train ticket for me after I tried to explain where I needed to go, and I managed to get on a train heading in the right direction. But in Europe, there are train inspectors who can randomly just come onto any train and ask for your ticket.. which of course, they did to me - and told me that because I had the wrong ticket (the ticket was bought with a half-fare card, which the person who bought it had, but I didn't) then I had to pay them a 100 CHF fine (about $120 with the exchange rate). I freaked out and basically sobbed that I was a student coming to Europe for the first time, I didn't know where I was going, etc, and they let me off with a 20 CHF fine and showed me the right track to the town.

Then there was actually finding the dorm, and then discovering my charger or phone didn't work; had to buy a new phone and SIM card and adaptor, plus groceries and other miscellanous items. Switzerland is expensive! Rent and food is about double of what it is in the states. There are trains that run everywhere, hardly anyone drives (and when they do, they are rather nice cars like Audis, BMWs, and Mercedes, but cars are so much smaller here). Though I've been here a month, I haven't picked up on Swiss-German very well; it's more of a dialect here because High German is the original language. Things have settled down quite a bit, now that I've gotten used to the commute to work and what to do around the city. To come later: more about research in Switzerland, Zurich, a trip to Lucerne, a fellowship retreat to Bern and the Alps... and I'm off to Milan tomorrow afternoon for the weekend!

A teaser of my pictures for now (yes, Switzerland is THAT beautiful):