Oxygen is … Bad?

12/6/2021

This week, I made exciting progress on my ISM journey. First, I researched for and wrote parts of my original work as it is coming together. I learned about the formatting of a research paper in order to model it in my work. This includes an abstract, introduction, and background, which all have different functions that I applied to my study. One of the topics I wished to look more in-depth in was oxygen toxicity and ROP. I researched this further this past week and learned about vascular endothelial growth factor and artificial oxygen’s implications on it, which contribute to ROP. This is extremely fascinating to me, as I never saw oxygen as having negative effects on humans before, and I addressed ways to counter such an issue in my original work. This coming week, I will finish my original work, which will take additional research. I will be discussing more areas of pediatric ophthalmology that could use more research or attention and hope to bring a new perspective of the field through my work. Additionally, I asked Dr. Jessica Thayer to be my mentor and she said yes! She is a pediatric ophthalmologist at UT Southwestern and Children’s Health. I am extremely excited and grateful for this opportunity to mentor her and look forward to gaining clinical experience in pediatric ophthalmology.