My name is Lorcan O’Rourke and I am currently in my first year of an ME in Electronic and Computer Engineering at UCD. During the summer of 2022 I partook in a Naughton Research 10-week summer placement at the University of Notre Dame.
When deciding what research project to choose for my placement, I paid close attention to those which allowed me to further apply my learnings from topics covered in my undergraduate at UCD while also giving me the freedom to explore new areas of research that I’m interested in.
Throughout my academic career I have sought to develop programmed solutions that solve technical challenges and inefficiencies in business and society. When I learned about Professor Maria Holland’s work, making the screening and segmentation process of MR images more streamlined, I was keen to learn more.
My project was entitled “Comparative neuroanatomy in non-human primates: segmentation and analysis.” All the students in my lab were pursuing PhDs in mechanical engineering and my project involved extending and streamlining a software pipeline for segmenting and creating cortical surfaces from MR images of non-human primates (NHP). This is a challenge as most automated software for segmentation and surfaces are tailored for the human brain and can’t handle the diversity of size and shape found in NHP. Instead, success depended on integrating a variety of software tools that can perform various parts of the process. In this project, I worked alongside another undergraduate researcher.
Throughout the summer, my entire research group offered me great support, especially Nagehan Demirci, one of the PhD students in the group. Our team met every Wednesday to discuss our research, and these meetings gave undergraduate researchers great exposure to all the activities of the research group.
My project entailed developing my knowledge of Python and using GitHub. I grew my project development skills for software engineering and explored some of the cutting-edge image analysis libraries for python.
I made sure to fully immerse myself in the experience, attending research talks, workshops and connecting with fellow researchers. I gained a real insight into the skills needed to make an impact in academia and new areas of research. For my work, I will be named as co-author on future research papers that use the pipeline I developed, which is an outstanding personal achievement.
I would highly encourage any students considering the Naughton Fellowship and research in Notre Dame to apply. I gained invaluable research experience and am glad that I could make a lasting contribution to the multidisciplinary research lab. I got the chance to learn from an exceptional talent pool while fully immersing myself in the research community. Exciting work was always available, and it gave me a great insight into the American education system and the possibility of conducting research and pursuing graduate school in America. I would also like to thank UCD for nominating me for the fellowship, my research group for welcoming me to Notre Dame, and of course the Naughtons for establishing and funding the fellowship. It was an incredible summer, and the memories that I made will last forever.
