Blog post 1/4

My name is Nele, and I’m a third year student of bachelor in biology. This semester, I’m taking the course “Research Practice in Biology (BIO299).

The dCod 1.0 research project: Decoding the systems toxicology of Atlantic cod is an interdisciplinary collaboration between environmental toxicologists, biologists, mathematicians and informatics. Right now, it is the in a phase where they’ve made a metabolic model of the cod liver. The provisional model has some unknown or incomplete processes and signaling pathways. My task will be to systematically search and organize published articles of cod and other fish species to map what is known from before. The resulting library will also be useful for other parts of the project, and further research on cod and other fish species.

A very theoretical task, with lots of searching, reading and frustration is waiting for me. Norwegian is my fourth language. I am originally German, but was raised in Denmark, and have now lived in Norway for 7 years. Additionally, I also speak English (of course), and my daily life is filled with jumping back and forth between the different languages. Also, have recently found out that I have dyslexia. Because of that I read slowly and my spelling may be a little odd. So naturally, the project scared me in the beginning, but the more Anders and Marta talked about it, I couldn’t help it and got more and more curious and interested. So, I look forward to getting frustrated and spending many hours searching for research articles. Aren’t the most challenging tasks those we learn most from?