Week Eight

Hello everyone! Sorry for the slightly late post. Between family responsibilities and my job, I've had very little time to blog. However, I'm glad that I've been busy since its actually given me a direction to go forward in. Lately, I've been thinking about where I should go to college and why, in addition to considering other aspects like research opportunities, academic rigor, diversity, etc. Most people would be terrified to think about where they want to spend the next four years of their lives, but I find it to be exciting for I feel this is the bridge that actually leads you to adulthood (or at least young adulthood).

Anyway, the previous week has been the most fruitful for my SRP. Dr. Steidley and I talked to Dr. Maurer and Dr. Moh-Lim Ong, Sr. Director of Global Medical Affairs, Rare Disease, and Global Innovative Products for Pfizer, Inc. about the next steps for our manuscript. Specifically, we talked about how we would all do the logistics of an analysis for our study and I feel that we have the potential to do something that's promising. In the THAOS registry there are about 600-700 patients whose MCFs can be calculated to find the probability of mortality from cardiac transthyretin amyloidosis. So we have a good sample size to determine if MCF is better than ejection fraction (EF) in predicting this disease. What Dr. Steidley and I have to do now is that we just need to create a Table 1 (a visual representation that includes the common observed characteristics in a particular study) while Dr. Ong and Dr. Maurer send us the data from the THAOS registry. They said that they would compile everything that we need in a week's time, and we would just send them the table whenever we're ready. Our goal is to get our side of the project done within the week they send the data to us, so that we can create an abstract that we could send for review to the American Heart Association (AHA). We're trying to get another paper published within the THAOS registry, since the last one was published a few years ago. If all goes well, then I believe that Dr. Steidley and I will actually be able to present our research findings at the next American Heart Association meeting later this year in November.

That's what is happening as of now with my project. In other news, I went to a lecture called "A Talk on a Talk" in order to learn how to give a great oral presentation for when I have to present my findings at the Mustang Library and hopefully at the AHA later this year. The biggest takeaway I got from the lecture, was that for any speech you give you should speak as if you're telling a story and that people naturally want to be moved by what you're saying. I'm write this to encourage myself to give my best effort for when I do present as well to remind myself to always go out of way to connect with whomever I'm speaking to; for I feel that no matter how technical or unknown the disease is if I can make someone empathize for the people that do live with the disease while raising awareness for it, then I feel that I would have truly done something beneficial with the wonderful resources and extraordinary people I've been blessed with.

Also, I'm not sure how I'm going to do this project for this week since Dr. Steidley will be out of town all week for several conferences. The best I can do is to continue to work on the presentation and finish creating our Table 1 early, for further revisions if necessary. I'll continue to let you all about my progress, so until I hope everyone has a great week!