Let's Take a TRIP Into My Life by Rohan Ramprasad

Hello everyone, my name is Rohan Ramprasad and I am very excited to be a part of TRIP @ WTHS’23! 

I am a current Junior at The Downingtown STEM Academy in the Health & Medicine Pathway, and one day, I hope to work in the medical field. Outside of school I am a part of numerous health care extracurriculars including being a an certified Emergency Medical Technician, Emergency Room/Intensive Care Unit Volunteer, and even recently founded a passion project I called Project Save a Life, which aims to educate communities on basic critical care medicine practices like CPR, AED, and First Aid, all free of cost, to mitigate the morbidity rates resulting from traumatic injuries. I am fascinated with the fields of trauma medicine and public health and their interaction, creating a niche field of medicine where I can not only indulge in the adrenaline rush of critical care when necessary, but also in finding ways to mitigate the need for such care via preventive health care measures. This exact reason is why I decided to join TRIP.  Before TRIP, I never sat down to realize the importance of lab research in its relation to patient care. ​

Apart from my life in academia, I love to play basketball whenever I get the chance. I played High School Basketball for Downingtown East for 2 years and continue to play pick-up hoops in my community. I also keep in touch with my cultural heritage by playing the classical “Carnatic Flute”, a 8-hole bamboo instrument originating hundreds of years ago in South India. My favorite cuisine apart from Indian food is Mexican food, and I love eating Chipotle whenever possible.

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This past Saturday we had our first day where we learned the basics of lab procedures like micropipetting, the math involved with diluting solutions, and even making fly food for our upcoming experiments! I have been assigned the question: How do rhodiola and head trauma affect anxiety? This is a preliminary research assignment before we synthesize our own research question as this assignment topic gets us started with laboratory procedures and how to run an experiment. I am very excited for next Saturday and the opportunity to finally examine fruit flies when drugs and stressors are involved.  I can not wait for these next couple weeks with Dr. Purdy and Dr. Leystra and for what they have planned for us!