Collaboration

On a typical day, I work with two maybe three people...Calvin, Christian and my mentor and sometimes another researcher in the office. Many people are going to be indirectly effected by my work because we are working on something that slipped everyone's mind in a way. No one is really thinking about how they are going to colorize the MRI images for the kids, they are all thinking about how to get the study going. What we are doing is going to save time and thought for all the other people involved in the study.


Directly I spend most of my day working with Calvin and as of this week Christian. We work pretty well together and it helps that we know each other from school. It influences the work because we are all working together, putting in perspectives and bringing our different talents to the table. Calvin knows all the computer stuff, Christian works with the design and the certificate and I look at the different brain images and keep up with all of the different aspects of our project.


Indirectly, there are all kinds of researchers and scientists that are effected by what we are working on, like I mentioned in the beginning. The kids who are going to be in PING are also effected because they get their very own brain image! This influences our work because we have to keep the kids in mind while we find the best angles, differences for each picture, colors and make it look cool to a kid, we are constantly thinking about what they would like.

If I were in charge, I think I would use collaboration almost the same way it is now. All of the scientific research is done with different people who work in different offices. There are more than just the people working in my office that are researching for PING. There are people on the floor below me (in Christians office) and people on the campus too. UCSD as a whole is also collaborating with 9 other colleges to conduct research and also with Scripps Research Institute to map a full genome of the kids involved. I think that is this field in particular, you work with a lot of people and learn about the importance of collaboration. A lot of things, including research work so much better when you have other people to bounce ideas off of and to contribute different things to a group.