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.