The right tool for the job can make all the difference. But what about when the job is neuroscience research and the right tool doesn’t exist yet? That was the conundrum facing Prachi Shah, a doctoral student in the biology department of Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences, when she walked into the Library’s Maker Hub.
Shah works on a team studying fruit flies, examining their brain activity in response to external stimuli to better understand memory function. “Fruit flies’ brains have more in common with humans’ than you might think,” she said. By observing their grey matter under a microscope, Shah and her colleagues hope to learn more about how memory functions at the cellular level under the effects of anesthesia.
While flies make for useful test subjects, their diminutive size presents some obvious logistical challenges with traditional scientific tools. When Shah found herself needing a custom part to hold the flies in place, her professor suggested the Maker Hub. “I had never been to a maker space before coming to Georgetown,” Shah said. “I had never seen a place like that, where there were all these tools free for students to use.”
She approached Maker Hub director David Strout and some student volunteers with her query. “I needed to print a custom part, and I had no 3D printing experience whatsoever. They walked me through how to make an STL file, and after a few tries, I had a working model.” From then on, Shah would return to the space and its passionate community of creators to craft more custom tools and research/instructional materials, including scaled-up models of fruit fly brains to help students visualize what they were studying in three dimensions.
“Our lab is lucky to have a space like this, especially working in a relatively young field where a lot of experiments require specific equipment that isn’t readily available,” Shah said. With the tools, space, and people to make anything they need, researchers like her can put their brains together and help look for knowledge in the most unexpected places.
Learn more about the Maker Hub here and stay up to date on upcoming workshops on the Library’s events page or the Maker Hub Google Calendar.