Yes, it looks like our young researchers had a great time and learned a ton in just eight short weeks. Most of them think they’re on the right career track too, which is always a nice thing. As for Jessica Shuen …well, the smile and the shirt speak for themselves.
Stop back tomorrow afternoon and see some images from the poster session. Better yet: come by in person if you can! 10:30 to Noon in the LSRC atrium.
Wendy Liu may have drawn one of the more soothing assignments in the HHMI summer fellows program. She spends her days in the Fred Nijhout lab pondering the wondrous complexity of developing butterfly wings under a microscope. The larvae, well they aren’t so attractive, but the wings are “one of the most fascinating and gorgeous elements found in nature.”
Yongho Park has posted two pictures of aquaporin molecules — first identified by Duke’s Peter Agre — that look rather like green crayons wrapped in yarn. One of them readily joins a lipid raft on the bilayer membrane, the other one doesn’t.
Yongho says you can figure it out yourself “if you keep staring at the images,” which we’re guessing he has during his time in the Thomas McIntosh lab.
It’s not all work and no fun for Jessica Shuen and the Nicole Calakos lab. This week they all went floating down the Eno River together and then had a multi-national potluck.
“It was a great way to get to know the people in my lab better. Everyone in my lab has funny idiosyncracies that I would not have found out about otherwise- I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of people to hang out with for 8 hours a day!”
Andrew Lyu wrote:
After almost 4 weeks in lab, I’ve found that I’ve moved away from the “What am I supposed to do today?” attitude towards more of a “What CAN I do today?” mood. It’s incredible how quickly you can get addicted to research. I find myself dreaming about protocols, coming in on the weekends (by my own free will
), staying until 7 or 8pm, and just getting completely wrapped up in what I’m doing. It’s truly been a great experience, and I definitely would like to continue researching throughout my undergraduate career.
And then the Brigid Hogan (corrected 7/16) Fan Wang lab got a paper accepted to Neuron and he saw that part of the operation too!
Sarah Steele has been so busy cleaning up messy explosions in her lab that she missed some of the ethics seminars last week. But at least she’s got pictures!
One would never mistake a fruitfly for a human, yet there are some remarkable biological similarities that make these insects very useful for biomedical research. Priya Khatri saw that first-hand this week when her PI, Nina Sherwood, showed her some movies of humans and fruitflies with a similar neuro-muscular disorder. Priya writes: “First she showed me a video of HSP patients and then the fly video. It was as if a field of lightbulbs had alighted, as well as thousands of questions.”
Reading these posts, sometimes it’s a little hard to believe that these are students who have had only one year of undergraduate education. Yishan Cheng describes her work on the Wnt signalling pathway in cancer stem cells about as well as anyone could in lay language.
Kristin Knouse is having some fun tweaking a signalling pathway called transforming growth factor beta (or TGFb) and seeing — actually seeing — what it does to cells. There’s a chance this pathway has something to do with cancer cells being able to spread via metastasis, so this is pretty cool stuff, in addition to making pretty pictures. I’ll let her explain it further.
Catherine Hartman has posted some pictures of the fly lab and told us about trashing half of her DNA samples by mistake. D’Oh!
