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Week 1 - Pooja Nair

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Name: Pooja Nair Clinical Mentor: Dr. Jason Spector Week 1 of clinical immersion began with shadowing several plastic and reconstructive surgeries. One case I want to highlight was a state‑of‑the‑art hand reconstruction. A malfunctioning chemotherapy port had caused localized necrosis, and surgical debridement left a significant soft‑tissue defect in the hand. To restore coverage, the team performed a reverse radial forearm flap, elevating and rotating the flap into the defect to re‑establish soft‑tissue integrity. 1,2 The donor site was then treated with DermiSphere™ (hDRT), a novel hydrogel‑based dermal regeneration template developed from technology discovered by Dr. Jason Spector. This innovative hydrogel–collagen matrix is designed to maintain an optimal wound‑bed environment and support regeneration following full‑thickness skin loss. 3 the area from where skin flap was harvested was providing an utterly innovative hydrogel, collagen-based dermal regeneration template that main...
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Week 1 - Hannah Sheffield

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The first week of Summer Immersion has been enriching. For reference, my project is with Dr. Gene Kim, and I will be shadowing Dr. Katerina Dodelzon on MWFs. I will organize this blog into two subsections, s hadowing  and research . Shadowing Throughout this experience, I want to focus on shadowing breast imaging (summer reserach) and cardiology (PhD research).  On Monday, I had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Dodelzon to get a general overview of breast mammography. She taught me that women may precede with normal and healthy lives if breast lesions are spotted early (with regular screenings). Additionally, she taught me how to read mammograms, and noted that dark regions represent fat, and bright regions represent fibroglandular tissue (milk ducts and lobules). She mentioned that there are 4 types of breast densities: fatty, scattered, heterogeneous, and extreme. Of those 4, mammography has a difficult time capturing heterogeneous and extreme breast densities. Given its di...
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Week 1: Seo-Ho Lee/Dr. Thomas Fahey

For this first week, I spent much of my time shadowing my clinical mentor and his team. My Immersion clinical mentor is Dr. Fahey, a surgeon in Endocrinology who specializes in minimally invasive surgeries. Dr. Fahey is also a collaborator of my PI, Prof. Shuibing Chen, so the project I will be working on involves both labs. Monday included orientation, meeting with my clinical mentor, and getting set-up in my PI’s lab, which is where I will be conducting research for my Immersion project. On Tuesday, I was able to see a surgery for the first time. Until then, I had only seen surgeries through media, so stepping into the operating room (OR) to see the patient under anesthesia and all of the surgical team working together seamlessly like a well-oiled machine was extremely fascinating and impressive. This first operation was a right hemithyroidectomy to remove a cancerous nodule, along with aspiration and pulsed field ablation of a few smaller nodules. The initial slew of medical termino...
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Week 1: Mary

I just finished the first week of the summer immersion program at Weill Cornell, where I've been shadowing Dr. Prince in the radiology department. As an MD-PhD, he works in research and patient care simultaneously, and it is striking how directly he's managed to connect the two. The problems he encounters with patients become research questions, and the tools his lab builds in response find their way back into his clinical practice.   Polycystic kidney disease (PKD) is a good example of how that plays out. Although Dr. Prince's  background is in whole-body MRI/radiology, his clinical work with PKD patients drew his attention to a significant problem with how kidney size is measured in these patients. For context, as PKD progresses, the kidneys steadily enlarge as cysts develop, so their total volume essentially reflects how far the disease has advanced. Then, the quick clinical shortcut is to approximate each kidney as an ellipsoid. This practice is fine fo...
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Alexandra Kot, Week 1: Welcome and Immersion Begins

Monday : 2026.06.01  It's official! With a badge and everything! I have joined Dr. Sandra Demaria's lab in the Department of Radiation Oncology as a summer immersion student. After being taken around a tour of the very well-organized lab and being given my own bench and desk (truly, a gift), I spent most of the rest of my day finishing the CITI and LMS trainings.  Tuesday : 2026.06.02 Today I attended our first weekly meeting. While mostly used to address any CWID issues this week, it was good to keep learning how to navigate the very big hospital. I was able to catch the end of the Demaria lab meeting, where Dr. Soler Agesta presented her data on the effect of mitochondrial DNA removal on interferon production post-irradiation of 3x8Gy. While I was able to understand the larger scientific conclusions of her work, I did a lot of note-taking. on terms and concepts I do not yet understand well so I can look them up later.  I was able to meet with Dr. Demaria today, as well....
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Week 1: Manav Surti

     The start of immersion has been very exciting and nerve-racking. There were many logistics to figure out, as access to certain portions of HSS and WCM requirements had not yet been granted. Despite having to figure out security access, badge acquisition, and general hospital locale, the start of the week was very eventful. On Monday and Tuesday, I was able to shadow Dr. Gomoll in the clinic as he conducted patient consults and follow-ups. It was very cool to be able to see some of the products I read about in research articles being implemented in patients, especially hyaluronic acid injections, as well as osteochondral allografts from donor tissue to repair defective articular cartilage of the femoral condyles. It was interesting to see a clinician's point of view regarding this. It was especially interesting to probe Dr. Gomoll's brain on what doesn't work about viscosupplementation, the act of injecting lubricious material into the joint space in order to restore ...
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Week 1 -- Safaa Mouline

I have the pleasure of working with Dr. Gauthier in Neurology this summer. The first thing I noticed this week was how the world of clinical research in a medical setting uses a completely different language than the world of academic scientific research. While this is perhaps quite an obvious observation, it was interesting to see how different lab meetings are here; in my Ithaca lab, we typically use MRIs that have already been collected, so talk of coordinating data collection and patient scanning was completely new to me. Beyond logistics discussions, through the lab meeting I also learned more about a specific MS lesion called a paramagnetic rim lesion as there were discussions to try to classify different lesions for a dataset the clinic has collected.  I also had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting in which all the different MS doctors at the clinic go over different cases they would like input on. All the cases were discussed with some imaging projected (T1, T2 FLAIR, QS...
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