The arrival of summer brings much excitement to Cold Spring Harbor and the Watson School鈥攂arbeques, volleyball, horseshoe crabs, and URPs.聽The swarm of URPs—officially, Undergraduate Research Program students—come for the summer from universities all over the world to do research in a CSHL lab.聽They learn what it鈥檚 like to be a scientist: they work on a real research question, spending long hours in the lab to get results. The URPs swim and kayak, make s鈥檓ores, learn Python, and see a show on Broadway. It鈥檚 a challenging summer but one in which the students make some great friendships and learn valuable skills for their futures. Most URPs continue on to very competitive graduate programs in biosciences or medicine.
Lital Chartarifsky is no exception. Lital was an URP in 2011, during the summer break from her studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.聽Lital was assigned to work in the lab of CSHL Professor Adrian Krainer.聽The title of her project was 鈥淭he Alternative Splicing Factor SRSF6鈥擜 Proto-Oncogene?鈥� On the first weekend of her URP summer, Lital cried.聽Not because she didn鈥檛 love her research, but maybe because she loved her research too much.聽She worked for hours and hours that first weekend of the summer鈥攚hile all of her fellow URPs enjoyed the weekend in New York City. But the weekend paid off and Lital鈥檚 research went well that summer. She had a great time at CSHL and found a true love for RNA splicing.
Lital spent the next two years working on her Master鈥檚 degree, studying how mis-regulation of RNA splicing contributes to disease. In 2013, she joined the Watson School for her Ph.D., still fascinated by splicing and cancer.聽But then something very unexpected happened—Lital gave up RNA and became a neuroscientist.聽She鈥檚 interested in the neural circuits that make decisions. In CSHL Associate Professor Anne Churchland鈥檚 lab, she鈥檚 studying how rats integrate what they see and hear to make choices, especially when the 鈥渃orrect鈥� choice is not obvious.聽She鈥檚 learning how to attach a camera to a rat鈥檚 head so she can watch the neurons firing in the brain.聽She鈥檚 learning linear algebra and more programming.聽She鈥檚 coming up with new ways to figure out what a rat is thinking.聽 Lital doesn鈥檛 think much about splicing at the moment.聽鈥淚 had been studying splicing for so long. I wanted a change. And neuroscience is so cool!鈥�
At CSHL, there is a distinct lack of boundaries between disciplines.聽Geneticists work with computational biologists, plant biologists work with cancer biologists, and neuroscientists work with RNA biologists.聽Or as in Lital鈥檚 case, they can be one in the same. The lack of boundaries extends to the educational framework of the Watson School. Even though Lital entered the program thinking about RNA, sitting through the Fall Term lectures on plasticity, fear, perception, spines, spikes, and everything else, she quickly realized the fascination that neuroscience holds. The interdisciplinary research at CSHL is also one of the things that attracted Lital to the Lab as an URP in the first place.聽She finds that the informal environment promotes a lot of interaction among scientists, which gives rise to collaborative projects.
Now that Lital is a graduate student starting on her Ph.D. thesis, what was it about being an URP at CSHL that inspired her?聽鈥淥ne of the things that I liked the most was the feeling that even as an undergraduate I was treated equally to more experienced students and researches.聽I was asked questions about my research and my opinions were taken into account. I loved it the feeling that this is a community in which everyone knows each other and you鈥檙e not just 鈥榦ne more student鈥� at the Lab.鈥�