MA INTERNSHIP REPORT MARJOLEIN MUES
January 18
th, 2019
Report Internship at Boston Children’s Hospital –
Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience
September 2018 – January 2019Marjolein Mues, s2456567
m.mues@student.rug.nl ReMa Language and Cognition University of Groningen Supervised by dr. Wim TopsTable of Contents
1 INTRODUCTION 4
1.1 PROCEDURE PRECEDING THE INTERNSHIP 4
2 DESCRIPTION OF PLACEMENT-PROVIDING ORGANIZATION 5
2.1 BOSTON CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL 5
2.2 LABS OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE – GAAB LAB 5
2.3 HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL 6
3 DESCRIPTION OF STUDENT’S TASKS AND RESPONSIBILITIES 7 3.1 GENERAL LAB RESPONSIBILITIES 7 3.2 PROJECT CONCERNING SPEECH-SOUND DISORDER 9 4 EVALUATION OF THE PLACEMENT 11 4.1 PLACE IN REMA PROGRAM 11 4.2 NEW KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS 12 4.3 PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES 12 4.4 LEARNING GOALS 13 4.5 SUPERVISION AT PLACEMENT 14 4.6 FUTURE CAREER GOALS 15 5 CONCLUSION 15 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY 17
1
Introduction
This report sets out to give a description of my internship at Boston Children’s Hospital. I started this internship on September 4 and finished on January 18. I am very thankful for this opportunity that was given to me by dr. Gaab, who I regard to be a great role model. I am also thankful for the supervision and mentorship given by dr. Zuk and dr. Tops. Being abroad can be challenging and lonely, but luckily I found some great new friends in the research assistants at the lab and my roommates, who literally took me everywhere, from haunted houses on Halloween to their families’ homes on Thanksgiving. This report is supposed to be about my academic goals and my learning outcomes, but my experience would not have been as great without them to share it with. So I think it is fair to use a couple of sentences to thank you for the city tours, the mac and cheese, the iced coffees while it is freezing outside, the baseball games, the white elephants, the Yankee gift swaps and the secret Santa’s, and the weird looks you give me when I say something weird, just when I think I am super fluent in your language.1.1 Procedure preceding the internship
One of the reasons I chose to do the Language and Cognition program is because a research internship abroad is a big part of it. Having done a Bachelor’s internship abroad, I knew that this would be a great opportunity to find out if I would be suitable to continue on a career path towards research, and if that would make me happy.
I began looking for the right place early on. Around December 2017, I started by asking several of my teachers if they knew of any internship possibilities for me in the field of Neurolinguistics or Clinical Linguistics. I got some great suggestions, but it just wasn’t completely what I was looking for, so I started looking by myself. By using Google, I almost accidentally found the website of the Gaab Lab.
The Gaab Lab seemed really cool and it was affiliated with both Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, which are two of the leading organizations in their field. Ultimately, given my interest in clinically relevant research, the fact that I would be at a hospital rather than a university, made me decide to email dr. Gaab with my CV and a cover letter. After some e-mail correspondence, dr. Gaab said I was welcome to conduct my internship at the Lab. Then, the hard part began. Going to the United States is not easy, let alone going to a (children’s) hospital. I needed to provide a lot of documents, and had to get several vaccinations and tests to clear my immunization history. I was very fortunate to be able to get a Dekker-Padget Dutch2USA scholarship from the Netherland-America Foundation and Fulbright, which helped me tremendously with the visa procedure. I finally received my visa and my immunization clearance only one week before I left for Boston on August 23rd. My start date was the fourth of September, so this gave me around a week and a half to ground before starting my time at the Gaab Lab, of which you will read a lot more in the following chapters.
2
Description of placement-providing organization
2.1 Boston Children’s Hospital - Until every child is well
Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) is one of the largest medical centers in the United States.1 It is located in the Longwood Medical Area in Boston, Massachusetts, adjacent to
its teaching affiliate, Harvard Medical School. BCH is currently led by CEO Sandra Fenwick and President Kevin Churchwell.2
Not only does BCH provide excellent pediatric care for children from birth through the age of twenty-one, but, accommodating the world’s largest research enterprise based at a pediatric hospital, they combine their clinical expertise with state of the art research.3
At BCH, the aim is to provide patients and their families with the best care in the world while trying to make their time there as pleasant as possible. Therefore, the hospital has a huge amount of volunteers and partners who try to put a smile on everyone’s face. Great examples are Boston sports teams The Red Sox (baseball), The
New England Patriots (football), The Bruins (ice hockey) and The Celtics (basketball),
who regularly make their appearance. Clearly, it is with good reason that U.S. News and World Report has ranked Boston Children’s Hospital as the best children’s hospital in the United States for the fifth year in a row in 2018-2019!4 2.2 Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience – Gaab Lab The Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience (LCN) are part of BCH’s Division of Developmental Medicine. At LCN, the goal is to further expand our knowledge of brain and cognitive development in typically and atypically developing children. Main areas of research focus are5: • Memory and face processing • The impact of environmental factors on cognitive development • Autism Spectrum Disorder • Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder • Dyslexia
LCN consists out of three labs: the Nelson Lab, the Faja Lab and the Gaab lab. This internship was conducted at the Gaab Lab. The Gaab Lab is led by dr. Nadine Gaab, who is an associate professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a faculty member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.6 At this point, 1 http://www.childrenshospital.org/about-us 2 http://www.childrenshospital.org/about-us/our-leadership 3 https://hms.harvard.edu/affiliates/boston-childrens-hospital 2 http://www.childrenshospital.org/about-us/our-leadership 3 https://hms.harvard.edu/affiliates/boston-childrens-hospital 4 https://health.usnews.com/health-news/best-childrens- hospitals/articles/best-childrens-hospitals-honor-roll-and-overview 5 http://www.childrenshospital.org/research/labs/laboratories-of-cognitive-neuroscience 6 http://thegaablab.com/us.html
there are four postdoctoral fellows and five research assistants under her mentorship as well as several part-time undergraduate student interns and, until very recently, one fulltime graduate student intern.
There are a lot of projects ongoing at the Gaab lab, but the major focus is on reading development and dyslexia. The lab has so far mostly focused on longitudinal projects concerning the developmental trajectory of reading and the behavioral and neural factors that influence this development. The main projects are:
• BabyBOLD7: a longitudinal project, tracking children from infancy until second grade. Using behavioral methods and MRI technology, the aim is to gain insight in the development of neural reading correlates of children with a genetic risk of dyslexia compared to typically developing children. This is the most important project at the moment.
• Milagros8: a longitudinal dyslexia screening research study focusing on bilingual Spanish-English speaking preschoolers in order to better understand the role of bilingualism in assessing reading tests to children.
• BELS9: the newest addition to the longitudinal line of research at the Gaab lab. The Boston Early Literacy Screening (BELS) is an evidence-based screenings app (for tablets) to detect children at risk for reading struggles prior to formal reading instruction. The app has already been developed and is currently being validated.
Apart from these main projects, several smaller research studies are being conducted. These studies focus on topics like music and language development, speech-sound disorder and reading, poverty and language development and dyscalculia.
What I personally think is really cool about the Gaab lab is that they combine linguistics and (developmental) psychology with neuroscience and physics; neuroimaging methods with behavioral tests; and humanities with medicine. This multidisciplinary approach ensures a rich research environment where there are always several opinions, solutions and points of view to any question or challenge. 2.3 Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) was established in 1782 and is dedicated to ‘improving health and wellbeing for all through excellence in teaching and learning, discovery and scholarship, and service and leadership”.10 It is the best medical school in the U.S. in the category “Research”11 and internationally recognized as being one of the leading medical schools in the world.
HMS is in many ways linked to Boston Children’s Hospitals, mostly because of BCH’s affiliation of teaching hospital in collaboration with Harvard, but also thanks to the many staff members that are working at both HMS and BCH, such as dr. Gaab. 7 http://thegaablab.com/babybold.html 8 http://thegaablab.com/milagros.html 9 http://thegaablab.com/app.html 10 https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms 11 https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-medical-schools/research-rankings
3
Description of student’s tasks and responsibilities
‘Hi, so what do you want to learn here?’ was the first thing dr. Gaab said when I met her for the first time. Not long after that I realized that independence was key in this lab and that, although everyone seemed more than willing to help me progress, it was up to me to decide what I wanted to do and learn in my time here. That made my start very difficult, but in the end, I really got to design my own internship and learnt a lot. 3.1 General lab responsibilities My internship started out with two responsibilities/tasks: 1. Attend lab meeting on Tuesdays 2. Find a project for myself to do, and do it. With the help of ‘my’ direct supervising postdoctoral fellow dr. Zuk (Jenny), I eventually outlined a really cool project about speech delay and reading that I could pursue during my internship using the available data.
Although my project still interests me immensely, I need change and variety. Luckily, I soon got more acquainted with the lab and the research assistants and their tasks, so my to-do list soon expanded to: 1. Attend lab meeting on Tuesdays 2. Do the project that I found for myself to do (which is actually a huge to-do) 3. Meet with people from outside the lab in light of afore mentioned project 4. Assist in behavioral assessment sessions with infants and toddlers 5. Assist during MRI sessions with infants and toddlers 6. Go to elementary school for outreach events 7. Help post-docs with preprocessing of their neuroimaging data 8. Be substitute research assistant when actual research assistants are temporarily unavailable 9. Any one-time-only, ad-hoc tasks Lab meetings on Tuesdays are basically the only moments during the week where every member of the lab is present in the lab. First, we would always discuss general things, such as upcoming events, new hospital policies or computers that broke down (which was a surprisingly frequently returning topic actually). Then we would go around and everyone would discuss what he or she had been doing that week, if there were any problems and what they intended on working on for the rest of the week.
I started helping the research assistants with behavioral assessments and MRI sessions (mostly for the BabyBOLD project) because I was curious how they assessed such young children (the youngest I helped with was only four months old) and what an MRI session looks like. Generally, the behavioral testing and the MRI session happen consecutively on the same night at the main hospital. Families come in between 18:00 and 19:00 to do the behavioral assessment with the child. This is done with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning12 and the Preschool Language Scales13, which measures
12 Mullen, E. M. (1995). Mullen Scales of Early Learning. Circle Pines: American Guidance Service.
13 Zimmerman, I. L., Steiner, V. G., & Pond, R. E. (2011). PLS–5: Preschool language scale – 5. San
cognitive ability and motor development in children from birth to 68 months. This takes between 30 to 60 minutes. While the research assistants do the assessments with the child, one of the parents fills out some questionnaires regarding the home literacy environment and the early development of the child.
When everything is done, the child and the parent that will accompany the child in the MRI get changed into scrubs. Before going to the MRI room, the parent starts the sleeping routine with their child. When the child is (almost) asleep, everyone goes to the MRI tech room. After ensuring that no one has any metal on them, the parent and child go into the space with the actual scanner. While the child falls asleep, the research assistants set up the experiments. If the child falls asleep, and the success rate is only around 50-60%, the child is put in the MRI scanner. A research assistant is in the MRI room with the parent and the child the entire time. Once the child is in the scanner, we start with either structural imaging (this gives as an anatomical overview of the brain in resting state) or functional scanning, which shows activation during an experiment (for instance to have the child listen to rhyme words while he or she is asleep). After scanning is complete, the people wearing scrubs change back into their everyday clothes and the research assistants show the parents back to the exit of the hospital. At latest, this can be around 22:00.
My tasks during this routing were mostly helping the parents fill out the right forms, holding the baby while testing, distracting any siblings that came along, and accompanying the parent and child in the room with the scanner or monitoring the session from inside the MRI tech room.
One of my favorite other tasks was going to outreach events. This generally entails going with one of the research assistants to a school that is either interested in collaborating with the lab or has already collaborated in a study. Kids are generally between five and eight years old and such an event takes 30-45 minutes. At the schools, we start by discussing in the classroom what the brain is, where you can find your brain (in your head), what you can do to protect your brain, etc. After that we would divide the group into two: one group would begin making a giant 3D anatomically correct, brain-shaped puzzle, while the others did crafts: we made headbands with little brains on the side that the children would color. These outreach events were all over Boston and Cambridge.
Another thing that I did on a weekly basis was helping the postdoctoral fellows. Sometimes one of them needed help with neuroimaging preprocessing, or mapping brain scans to a ‘brain atlas’, which fit really well into my learning goals. These things were a great way for them to get things done and for me to learn more about neuroimaging.
Occasionally, it would happen that all the research assistants were absent simultaneously, because they were testing, at a conference, or just stayed home for some reason. On those days I would take charge of their pertinent responsibilities such as answering questions when someone called in, or pick up a family and take them to the right tester for behavioral assessment, etc.
Lastly, over the course of five months I took on several one-time-only tasks. One of the really cool ones was going to a conference with dr. Gaab and some of the research assistants to hear her and others talk about reading development and to talk to research professionals about the lab and our work. Another good example is when my direct supervising postdoctoral fellow had to write a grant-application to fund a project regarding speech-sound disorder and asked me to read and review it. Lastly, I was lucky enough to attend some classes about typical and atypical brain development at Harvard, taught by dr. Gaab.
Overall, the best thing of my position in the lab was that I wasn’t really an employee, but I wasn’t really considered an intern either. This benefitted me in the sense that if something needed to be done, it was really up to me whether or not I wanted to do it. If I felt it would add to my experience, for instance helping with neuroimaging preprocessing or MRI data collection, I would volunteer to help, but I didn’t do that if I felt it wouldn’t add to my experience.
3.2 Project concerning speech-sound disorder
I spent a lot of time working on my own project at the Gaab Lab. In the first few weeks, I looked at the previous and ongoing projects and the data and talked to all the lab members about possibilities. The project I eventually chose to do was something that one of the postdocs always intended to do, but just never got around to actually doing.
The data I used is part of the READ study, which is very similar to the current BabyBOLD project. Children were assessed before formal reading instruction and were then followed throughout first and second grade. Because this project had already ended, all the data were readily available, including already analyzed speech samples of over a hundred children.
My particular research question looked into the relationship between speech and literacy. So far, it has been established that children with speech delay (SD) have a small yet significant enhanced risk for reading disabilities, but it is not sure why.14 15 16
Phonological awareness has been named as one of the most important mediators for this relationship, but many factors remain unknown.17
Using the READ data, I pursued mediation and regression analyses using several factors that had not been incorporated in earlier (outdated) studies, such as Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) and Socio-Economic Status (SES). Results showed that of 14 Sices, L., Taylor, H.G., Freebaim, L., Hansen, A. & Lewis, B. (2007). Relationship Between Speech-Sound Disorders and Early Literacy Skills in Preschool-Age Children: Impact of Comorbid Language Impairment. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 28(6), 438-447. 15 Overby, M.S., Training, G., Smit, A.B., Bernthal, J.E. & Nelson, R. (2012). Preliteracy Speech Sound Production Skill and Later Literacy Outcomes: A study using the Templin Archieve. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services at Schools, 42(1), 97-115 16 Hayiou-Thomas, M.E., Carroll, J.M., Leavett, R., Hulme, C. & Snowling, M.J. (2017). When Does Speech Sound Disorder Matter for Literacy? The Role of Disordered Speech Errors, Co-Occuring Language Impairment and Family Risk of Dyslexia. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(2), 197-205. 17 Overby, M.S., Training, G., Smit, A.B., Bernthal, J.E. & Nelson, R. (2012). Preliteracy Speech Sound Production Skill and Later Literacy Outcomes: A study using the Templin Archieve. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services at Schools, 42(1), 97-115
the children with speech delay in kindergarten, 39% had reading difficulties in second grade, and that, if you incorporate key literacy predictors (RAN, phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge), the relationship between speech and reading is fully mediated and speech no longer attributes any additional unique variance. A summary of the findings of this study is:
• We found substantial comorbidity between early speech delay and subsequent
reading difficulties (40%) in our sample
• There is a significant positive relationships between speech accuracy and word
reading outcomes
• Mediation analyses showed that the relationship between speech and reading is: • Not fully mediated by phonological awareness, SES or early language
abilities
• Fully mediated by key early literacy predictors
• Regression analysis showed that especially RAN and SES are important factors to
take into account when examining this relationship
• Although SES does play an important role, is does not solely explain the
relationship between speech and reading Which implicates that:
• Children with speech delay would benefit from early literacy screening to identify
children at risk and if so, incorporate this area into their speech and language pathology treatment plan
• Children with speech delay will likely be identified for an early risk for reading
difficulties based on key predictors of early literacy skills But, there are some limitations such as:
• The average SES in our sample is relatively high and SES in our sample is not
normally distributed
• We used a retrospective classification for speech delay
• The present findings focus on children with typical language abilities, so these
relationships likely differ among children with developmental language disorders (DLD)
I also looked into the neuroimaging data with respect to this project, using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). DTI looks at white matter properties. I correlated these white matter properties in areas specific to language with reading outcomes and also checked if these properties differ between children with and without speech delay. After correcting for multiple comparisons, no significant results were found. The fMRI data I used were obtained using a First Sound Matching task. This basically means that the child, while being in the MRI scanner (in second grade, when he/she does no longer have to sleep in the scanner), has to indicate if two words start with the same sentence. Using the subtraction paradigm (e.g. subtracting a task that is similar, in order to remove functional activity that is not of interest, for instance by pressing the button or hearing the sound) we eventually ended up with the functional activity in the brain per child throughout the task. After preprocessing of these images (for instance by realignment, in order to make up for
movement during scanning), these can be used for analysis. However, comparing children with and without speech delay and with and without reading difficulties (2x2 design), no significant differences in brain activity were found during this task. Even though we did not find any results in the pursued neuroimaging analyses, I learnt a lot about the methodology as well as analyzing this kind of data. Besides that I gained practical experience with Matlab18 and SPM.19
As my internship is coming to an end, we are still working on some final analyses and are starting to write up the results in preparation of a manuscript for submission to a speech-and-language-pathology focused journal. I can continue doing this from the Netherlands, as I have been given Associated Personnel (AP) status and as such can keep my email address and access to the server from an (encrypted) laptop.
Overall, I think my tasks and responsibilities at the Gaab Lab are best described by the word ‘comprehensive’. Without exaggerating, I can say that I have had an in-depth research experience at the Gaab Lab, and somewhere along the way became more of a fulltime lab member than an intern.
4
Evaluation of the placement
4.1 Place in ReMa program
A research internship is a mandatory part of the second year of the Language and
Cognition master’s program. Students are encouraged to go abroad during for this
internship. One of the things that I really like about this master’s program is that student have the possibility of tailoring the program according their personal interests. My personal interests lay somewhere in the middle of the fields of Neurolinguistics and Clinical Linguistics, so in my first year I have pursued courses within these fields. Since my internship combines these two fields, I feel that my courses were an excellent preparation for this internship.
Relevant courses that I took in my first year were:
• Developmental Language Disorders (in which I learnt more about research perspectives on developmental language disorders, clinical aspect in atypically developing populations and writing literature reviews);
• Language, Brain and Cognition (in which I learnt more about neuroimaging methods within linguistic research and writing a research proposal)
• Methodology and Statistics for Linguistic Research (in which I learnt to use R20 to execute advanced statistical analyses such as mixed-effects models)
Considering that for this internship, I used R to do statistics on neuroimaging and behavioral data in order to investigate children with a developmental language disorder, 18 MATLAB 8.0 and Statistics Toolbox 8.1. Natick, Massachusetts: The MathWorks, Inc. 19 Friston, K., Ashburner, J., Kiebel, S., Nichols, T., & Penny, W. (2007). Statistical Parametric Mapping : The analysis of funtional brain images (First ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier/Academic Press. 20 R Development Core Team (2008). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
I think that taking these courses was the most compatible and complete preparation I could have wished for. Ultimately this really was the perfect scenario because this practical internship fit into and added to the theoretical courses in my Master’s program and my personal interests seamlessly.
4.2 New knowledge and skills
Newly acquired skills, in no particular order:
• Working with Linux, SPM and Matlab in order to preprocess and analyze neuroimaging data
• Administering behavioral tests to infants and toddlers from the age of four months onwards
• Teaching myself new statistical analyses (mediation and moderation analyses) using online sources and execute them in R Studio • Learning how to make neuroscience relevant and fun for children (and teachers) in elementary schools, thanks to the outreach events • Working in a team • Being able to discuss the progress and difficulties of a research project in English during a weekly lab meeting • Writing in academic English • Give detailed and extensive, yet constructive feedback on other people’s work • Independently working on my own research project, including literature review, data analysis and writing and organizing meetings with relevant people of inside and outside of the lab in order to gain feedback • Networking • English language skills in professional and a social settings Newly gained knowledge about (non-exhaustive and also not in any particular order): • Research methodology and design: behavioral as well as neuroimaging, but
specifically imaging using functional MRI, structural MRI and DTI • Typical (language) development in children from birth to second grade
• Developmental language disorders, including, but not limited to, dyslexia and speech-sound disorder • The impact of environmental and genetic factors on language (such as poverty or exposure to alcohol in utero (environmental) and birth order (genetic)) • Team dynamics • Future research perspectives • Behavioral testing and tests in the United States • Privacy, ethical and safety laws and practices in the United States 4.3 Professional practices This course has tied in with my professional practices for several reasons. Mostly, this was a great opportunity to explore if research is something that I could really see myself doing after graduating. Since there was a lot of independence during my time at the Gaab
Lab, I feel like it was very similar to how it would be starting a PhD. I enjoyed being able to work independently on something that I am interested in, so in that sense I feel more empowered to pursue a career in research. However, spending a lot of time with the postdoctoral fellows has also shown me some downsides of this career path, as they had a lot of stress and trouble balancing their work and their personal lives.
Ultimately, it did strengthen me in my decision to pursue a PhD, because I just really enjoyed my independence and the variety of things to do during this time and it felt really good to make an effort to combine clinical relevance with research. Working in this particular field makes it so much easier to combine research with meeting patients and talk to parents and non-research personnel, a combination that I enjoy a lot. I just felt really happy during my time here, which is my main reason to keep continuing on this path. What does help a lot, is that I seem to be pretty decent at it too, which might also be part of the reason why I enjoy doing research. 4.4 Learning goals
In the beginning of my internship, I set the following five overarching main goals together with Jenny: 1. Focus on the cognitive neuroscience of typical and atypical development 2. Learn more about dyslexia & examine factors that promote reading development 3. Learn more about neuroimaging: acquisition and analysis 4. Gain experience with independent research in preparation for PhD 5. Gain experience in writing in English I am happy to say that I feel confident that I have achieved all my learning goals. The first learning goal has been ongoing throughout my entire internship and has been part of most of my tasks. I have achieved this goal by reading a lot of papers suggested to me by the postdoctoral fellows or dr. Gaab, helping with neuroimaging data acquisition and analysis and hearing about this topic during every lab meeting and through personal conversations.
My second goal has also been ongoing in the sense that reading outcomes were a big part of my project regarding the relationship between speech and reading. However, I feel like I mostly focused specifically on this goal before I really started with that project, because then I shifted my focus towards researching speech delay. Before starting my project I read a lot of papers about dyslexia and ‘protective’ and ‘risk’ factors, and I read up on the research done at the Gaab Lab, which focuses closely on this. Since a lot of projects revolve around reading development and dyslexia, I also learnt a lot by listening to other people talk about their project.
Although there is so much more to know, I have definitely learnt a lot more about neuroimaging, which was my third goal. Going to lectures and presentations (such as Nadine’s presentation at the dyslexia conference) and looking through old presentation materials from the postdoctoral fellows helped me in understanding the physics and mechanism behind MRI, fMRI and DTI (all are collected using an MRI scanner). Learning about the complicated underlying processes and biological responses involved, makes me appreciate this method even more. Being in a hospital, I was able to combine this
theoretical knowledge with going to MRI sessions and actually being in the room with the MRI scanner during active sessions, which was really cool. I also spent a decent amount of time in the MRI tech room, where I could ask the technician about the process while it was happening and while I could literally see the brain scans appear on the computer screens. Looking at those scans in real time, while a child is being scanned is super cool and that alone would have been enough reason for me to conduct my internship at a hospital rather than a traditional university. Lastly, concerning this third learning goal, I got analysis experience by helping the postdoctoral fellows with preprocessing the data (first-level analyses) and in my own project where I pursued second-level analyses (correlations, t-test, regression), giving me experience with SPM and Matlab.
My fourth learning goal is very straightforward. I have gained so much experience; even just by being in a research lab and listening to other people talk about research, but also of course by all my different endeavors during this internship.
Lastly, for my fifth learning goal, the person that is reading this can judge if I passed the test for English writing. Although I wrote a lot during this internship and feel like a made huge progress, the best is yet to come in moving forward with writing a manuscript for submission. 4.5 Supervision at placement Although I finalize this internship on a super positive note, and my memory of the Gaab Lab is already a very happy one, it originally did not start out as the best, partly due to myself and partly due to an initial scarcity of supervision at the Lab. On my first day, no one in the lab really expected me, which was mostly because the former lab coordinator had just quit the job and the new coordinator was not yet fully aware of all ongoing affairs. So when I first got to the lab, there was no one there. Eventually, the new lab coordinator, who currently does her job brilliantly by the way, came in, but clearly did not really know what to do with me. It wasn’t until three weeks later that I settled on a final project to pursue and I could focus on that.
In those three weeks before, I spent my time in the office with the postdocs, but they mostly work from home, so I was alone for two or three days a week at least, without clarity of expectations like a starting time or something to work on. As I was still settling in at this new place, in a different country, I didn’t strive to change this very actively in the beginning. However, after a few weeks, things really started looking up, because I got used to Boston and being away from home, which made that I put a lot more effort into getting to know the lab, and finding some clarity about what I could do. In return, the people in the lab were very nice and soon included me in both professional and personal events. Also: one of the postdoctoral fellows, who was on vacation came back, and actually came into the office on a daily basis, which was so much better. I also talked to Jenny about the issues of not really knowing what to do while I was so eager to learn new things, and she helped me set up a plan, which was super helpful. There was just so much freedom and people telling me that I could do ‘anything I wanted’, but I did not really know anything yet that was going on, so it was hard to
figure out what I wanted to do. This plan really helped with that, because it also included regular check-ins with Jenny to decide on further steps and it focused on setting goals and how to reach those goals.
I generally met up with Jenny on Tuesdays and Fridays, sometimes briefly, sometimes longer. It was really nice to have these regular check-ups, especially because Jenny was gone a few days a week due to her clinical work as a speech and language pathologist. I feel like Jenny was a great supervisor, letting me figure out a lot on my own, but helping me when I needed it. We also connected well on a personal level. It might seem trivial, but I feel super lucky to have been surrounded by so many strong female role models. Dr. Nadine Gaab is absolutely amazing and very open about things she experienced throughout her research career, for instance about being a mother and having a family, but also about prejudice and how to deal with comments like ‘I think you responded too emotionally’. Nadine showed me that you can be a nice person and still succeed in a research career, which I funnily enough had started questioning. Besides Nadine, Jenny has also been a great role model. We had and still have a good relationship and talked about so many different things, research related or not. She she put in a lot of effort to help me throughout my internship, even with things that were unrelated such as PhD applications and cover letters. Three other people I would love to mention are Tiffany Hogan, professor at Mass. General Hospital Institute who gave me a lot of feedback on my project; Sandra Maislen, who is the director of the Division of Developmental Medicine (of which the LCN is a part of) who always made time to chat with me and give me tips for upcoming trips and things to do, even though she has a busy schedule; and Sandra Fenwick, CEO of the hospital, who I really only saw twice, at general hospital events (one of which was when she was giving out ice cream to celebrate the last ‘scoop’ of the excavation for a new building) and talked with very briefly. Regardless, that she even takes the time to talk to everyone, and to be a part of everything that is going on in the hospital is super cool.
I am the luckiest person to have met these women, who are not only researchers, but also real people with real lives, who have kids, or even grandkids, but seem to combine that so well with their career. And above all, they are all great, and compassionate leaders, and that continues to inspire me.
4.6 Future career goals
As for (near) future career goals, I intend to apply for PhD programs in the field of Clinical and Neurolinguistics in order to continue a meaningful path towards a career in research.
5
Conclusion
I think it does not come as a surprise to anyone when I say that I had a great time at the Gaab Lab and have learnt so much about all aspects of research, from actual data collection and analysis to lab politics and fierce competition. It was the ultimate
preparation for a PhD and I am confident that after learning and achieving so much in such a short period of time, I am ready to take on this next step after graduating my Master’s. There are two final things that I would like to mention: 1. Now that my internship is finished, I will continue to work for the Gaab Lab from the Netherlands in order to finalize a paper with Jenny, dr. Gaab and dr. Hogan 2. After this mutually positive experience, the Gaab Lab has offered to take on one
or two students for internships next year, which is a great opportunity for (prospective) students in the future. Thank you Gaab Lab for the life long skills and connections. I will be back!
6
Bibliography
6.1 Webpages (retrieved between 01-01-2019 and 18-01-2019) http://www.childrenshospital.org/about-us http://www.childrenshospital.org/about-us/our-leadership https://hms.harvard.edu/affiliates/boston-childrens-hospital https://health.usnews.com/health-news/best-childrens-hospitals/articles/best- childrens-hospitals-honor-roll-and-overview http://www.childrenshospital.org/research/labs/laboratories-of-cognitive-neuroscience http://thegaablab.com/us.html http://thegaablab.com/babybold.html http://thegaablab.com/milagros.html http://thegaablab.com/app.html https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-medical-schools/research-rankings 6.2 Articles, books and software Friston, K., Ashburner, J., Kiebel, S., Nichols, T., & Penny, W. (2007). Statistical ParametricMapping: The analysis of functional brain images (First ed.). Amsterdam:
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