Summer students gain research knowledge and bring value to the lab
Summer students gain research knowledge and bring value to the lab
Students in the Summer Science Internship program in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford gain valuable research experience that can help them as they consider career paths, but the students can also benefit the labs in which they work. Take, for example, the work conducted by Andrew Kurien this past summer.
After his graduation as valedictorian of Rockford Christian School, Kurien volunteered in the Regenerative Medicine and Disability Research Laboratory with Mathew Mathew-Thoppil, PhD, where he had served as a Summer Science intern the previous year. While he worked with Dr. Mathew on a project to create an electrochemical biosensor that could be useful for assessing stroke patients, he also used his computer skills to create a program to automate the previously tedious process of data extraction for all experiments involving electrochemical biosensors in the RMDR Lab.
“This automation significantly reduces the manual workload, allowing data extraction to be completed in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods,” says Dr. Mathew.
Kurien, who is now a University of Illinois Chicago student in the College of Medicine’s Guaranteed Professional Program Admission Medical Scholars Program, used AutoHotkey v2 and Windows PowerShell to create a program that emulates human behavior through mouse movements and clicks, enabling it to navigate menus, select files and transfer substantial volumes of data between applications.