RET EXPERIENCE

Jan Cathey Physics Teacher Siegel High School

            The first week in the biomedical optics lab was spent doing four lab activities designed for the biomedical engineering optics course.  As a high school physics teacher, I found these labs fun and new.  My understanding of lasers and lenses has grown and I know this experience will have a positive impact on my curriculum.  The level of math was challenging at times, but I learned new ways to analyze data using Excel instead of Graphical Analysis.

After completing the first four labs, I worked on developing my module in the BME computer lab.  I wanted my module to be about the nature of light covering areas such as color, polarization, and the electromagnetic spectrum.  It took more than a week of searching the Internet to find a good central topic on which to base my legacy cycle. Topics were started and discarded over and over.  I finally decided to base my module on a crime scene.  I felt this would allow the flexibility to cover all of the areas of light.  Once that decision was made, I spent many hours trying to contact people involved in forensic work.  When I was not busy working on my lab project, all of my time was used to learn about forensic investigations. 

When a graduate student was working on something in the optics lab, I would watch and ask questions.  The graduate students were great and took time to explain their projects. I observed one student stimulating the sciatic nerve of rats using a laser.  The rats were injected to put them to sleep and the surgery was done right in the lab.  A few days later, the same student tested the rats to see how well they walked.  Talking to the grad students was very informative and I have great examples of how basic physics is being used in current research projects.

My lab project involved making skin transparent to light using the osmotic agent glycerol.  I measured the amount of laser light passing through a piece of mouse skin with and without glycerol.  The set up had to measure light at different angles to find how the glycerol changes the scattering of the light.  I spent more than a week reading articles related to the project and another week on making the measurements.  I was relieved to find out that I was not expected to design or develop the method in the short time we had in the lab.  Dr. Duco Jansen was very supportive and explained everything I did not understand on my level.  Overall the five weeks at Vanderbilt has been a great experience. 

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