Hasan

Hello reader!

My name is Hasan Mehdi and I am an upcoming senior at the University at Albany, pursuing a BS in Biology. I joined the Scimemi lab in the summer of my junior year and have been here ever since!
In my free time, I love playing videogames, ping pong, and basketball. I also love hiking.
Doing research at the lab has taught me a wide range of skills that I never would have imagined. Over the summer, I was taught how to care for a mice colony by Gabrielle Todd as well as genotype them using the polymerase chain reaction. I watched and performed stereotaxic brain surgeries with Patrick Wehrle and learned how to read and present research papers to the rest of the lab. During the school year, I worked with Saad Ahmad and learned the software side of neuroscience, using programs like Imaris to reconstruct confocal images of astrocytes and dendrites, and Igor to conduct density analyses and compile our raw data into figures to present in papers and posters. I also learned how to use Fiji to perform a simple neurite tracer analysis to create figures of all the neurons we analyzed and observed and conducted mouse perfusions with Saad.
Being at the lab has kept me busy. Just in the last couple weeks I presented our poster Dendritic spine morphology changes following stereotaxic injections of A𝛽42-AAV for the 39th Annual Biological Sciences Undergraduate Research Symposium and the CURCE 19th Annual Student Conference. In the future, I want to combine my love of Biology with the world of coding, in the Bioinformatics field. This summer I have been accepted to do a Bioinformatics fellowship at the RNA Institute to get some direct experience with the field.

Hasan