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Internship Week 3

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I'm interning virtually at the Paegel lab, a pharmaceutical chemistry lab at UC Irvine with Dr. Brian Paegel, professor of Pharmaceutical chemistry at UC Irvine. On the lab's official website, the overall goal is stated: "The Paegel lab studies and applies the principles of miniaturization, which have driven revolutions in semiconductor microfabrication and genome sequencing, to both chemical synthesis and analysis. We seek to expand the pipeline of new medicines by democratizing drug discovery and investigating novel therapeutic targets that do not conform to the canonical constraints of druggability."  That is a lot of large, complicated words grouped together. Let me break it down. Essentially, the way drugs are developed today through most massive pharmaceutical companies are through massive, incredibly expensive machines that run millions of different possible drugs at a time on a specific enzyme or protein (like the COVID-19 spike protein) to see what happens. D...
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After my first week of internship, there are many feelings rushing through me: excitement, exhaustion, passion and confusion. I am excited for next week, and ready to continue working on my project. I feel exhausted - but it’s a good type of exhaustion - from the work I've been doing. I feel passionate about my project and the work I’m doing. I’m confused from all the things I’m learning, but it’s keeping me thinking, and I know I will understand it all eventually. I’m interning virtually at Dr. Brian M. Paegel’s drug discovery lab, where I will be learning and using R , a data science programming language to create Monte Carlo simulations for combinatorial chemistry (don’t worry - I’ll go deeper into what I’m doing in my week 2 blog post). My mentors are Dr. Paegel himself, as well as two graduate students who will be helping me on my internship journey. My hopes for this internship are to really learn and dive into something not completely ‘new,’ but something that I can really t...
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