13 September 2001 - Lindsey Hillesheim ('99)

[Editor's note: Lindsey is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.]

I thought I should give you an update as to what I've been up to. I was out at Holden Village the last few weeks of August, and of course there's all the stuff you have to take care of before you go, and just 2 days after I returned the fall semester started. Holden Village was a much needed break. It was REALLY nice to NOT be a physics graduate student for awhile. I think it was the first time in awhile that I had time to do some extensive thinking on things other than day to day life. I did some writing and reading, and learned to "throw pots" (make clay pottery on the wheel). I actually really enjoyed the latter, so much so, that I'm taking a class on it here (but not a U class). And of course I did lots of hiking. It was the first time I got up close and personal with mountains; I had only seen them from planes before. We hiked up to Cloudy Pass and after working our way along a ridge, we came to a sort of "alpine meadow" from which we had a view of almost the entire North Cascades. All we could do to respond to the beautiful immensity of it all was laugh.

This semester looks like it will be busy. It was hard to come back after my time out at Holden-- I'm making headway in my research and will (hopefully) be submitting an abstract within a few weeks for the Biophysical Society conference in February in SAN FRANCISCO (a place I have never been to yet). I've got a lot of classes yet, but this is my last year of them. The big news is that I got an NIH Molecular Biophysics Training Grant. Its renewable for another year after this one, and there is also a travel stipend. But the biggest thing, I guess, is getting to put it on my CV. I'm making an effort to leave the lab by 6:30pm unless I've got some pressing thing to do and not come in one day a week (okay, so its not really a difficult resolution to follow through on). Course I just have to go home and do homework...My advisor just added an undergraduate to our group, and I'm the "contact person" for him, which means basically I'm teaching him the ropes and advising him on his project. It?s a lot of fun, and its sort of reinforcing my desire to teach.

I joined the group of an experimental biophysicist who was hired within the past year in the physics department. We got to help set up the lab this summer (which meant a fair amount of machining initially) and now have a basic instrument to take data with. The technique is called Fluorescent Fluctuation Spectroscopy. Basically we shine a tuned laser beam into a microscope and an objective focuses the beam on the sample which is labeled with a fluorophore. From the fluctuations in the fluorescent intensity we can get information about different properties of the sample. I am studying beta amyloid proteins; they aggregate to form the plaques that characterize Alzheimer?s disease. The technique is very sensitive to low concentration and to the aggregation of monomers to form oligomers. There is considerable evidence that it is the small oligomer aggregations that are neurotoxic in AD. I just started labeling proteins this past week, so I?m still at the beginning! I will also be looking at how sampling time, dead time (of the detectors?either APDs or a PMT?and acquisition card) and after pulsing affect the various ways we can analyze our data (such as autocorrelation functions, moment analysis, etc.) I do enjoy my research and my new group and advisor, but I have to say that graduate school, as an endeavor, has lost a lot of appeal lately.

Other than class, research, training for a 10 mi race here in the Twin Cities (I'm not quite wanting to do marathons yet!) and some school related committee stuff (I'm on the University Senate Advisory Committee on Athletics and will hopefully get on the physics department's grad studies committee, where I WILL be bringing up and hopefully changing our academic advising system and the protocol for professors outside of the dept to apply to take on physics grads so no one else gets screwed over like I did) I don't have much going on--probably because I don't have the time, and when I do, I don't have the energy!

I am thinking about coming down to Valpo for a visit during homecoming. So perhaps I will see you then, if not, then hopefully sometime soon.

Take care,

Lindsey