The LAB

I thought I'd take some pictures of work just in case anyone is interested and these were the results.......

So i have an office which i share with my bosses Martin and Thomas.

My days pretty much consist of coming into work, checking work e-mail then if I have something to scan I will go down to the lab otherwise I will stay upstairs and work on either one of the ongoing projects for martin or Thomas or one of my own projects......

So maybe I should explain about the scanners. They are micro computed tomography scanners which essentially take a series of xrays in a circle around the sample and then the information from each xray is compiled into a set of data that provides a lot more detail than a single xray.
We have three scanners, to with 40micrometer resolution and one with 80 micrometer resolution. I am also responsible for scanner maintenance which is pretty much just a set of calibration scans once a week. The acctual scanning process is probably the most mindless thing i do at work. I prepare the sample in a scanning vial making certain that it is well fixed (if it moves during scanning it causes artifacts) . Thus far i have scanned a series of human biopsies ( i can't beleive they take chunks that big out of people), whole mouse legs, mouse tibia, and humerus, sheep tibia and vertebra, pills, scaffolding for cells, and last but not least some lindt chocolate! After sample prep you put them in the scanner and boot up the measurement program. the rest is history....

The project work that i do for martin and thomas mostly consists of data backup, data preprossecing as well as some processing. This means that i help tak ethe image data from the measurement disk where it is located after a scan, and put it on th project disk. then i go throught the steps of filtering, contouring for specific regions and then all sorts of image manipulation to retain only certain protions of the image ect.

My own project for this year is three seperate things. The fist is called JAX which is a study started quite a few years ago that looks at a series of about 2000 mouse vertebra. my job is to write appropriate masks to subselect cortical ( hard outer bone) from trabecular(spongy inner bone) so that density analysis can be preformed on all the vertebra. The tough part is the mask needs to theoretically work for each vertebra....... Anyway that project is moving along ok. Second thing on my list is revamping some image visualization software developped at the institute.... just code orginisation mostly maybe a few extra features. I havn't started this yet but I have a feeling it's going to be a big task. The last project is more development of a program that i havn't used yet. I havn't thought about this one too much because I don't know if i will get there....

Yea so this is it! I should also mention , just so you can visualize it, that the lab is on floor C in the second "finger" of the building. The office is on floor E between the 3 and fourth fingers of the building. Floor c is the subbasement so occasionally walking down to an empty lab at 7 in the morning is a little nerve racking but mostly I grab my Ipod and dance all the way there. It's a solid walk.....

The campus itself is a little strange. They call it science city sometimes which i just found out about, thats not the wierd part though... It's located on top of a big hill and is surrounded by pastures. Not unending ones, you can see civilization but we are definitely blessed with the smell of manure from time to time. It acctually kinda reminds me of home.

To get to work in the morning Rachel and I normally take the 8:21 train from Baden to Affelturn which is kinda a suburb of Zurich. then we can walk or take the bus up the hill. If we miss that first train we can go directly to mainstation Zurich and get tow work up the otherside of the big hilll.