Back To Work

This week I was back at lab – no more vacation! Unfortunately, I came down with some sort of virus over the weekend so I was unable to attend our Monday night panel where PRISE Fellow alumni talked about getting into graduate school. Luckily, I was able to attend the Distinguished Speaker Series on Thursday, and I had a great time listening to Professor Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay. The title of her talk was “NEW FLASH: Robot finds ice on Mars (Martians on Earth Rejoice).” Although this has been all over the news lately, on July 31st, 2008, NASA announced that the Phoenix Mars Lander had found water on Mars: “We have water”. Professor Stewart-Mukhopadhyay talked about what Mars and it atmosphere were like, and then delved into her work on impact craters. Pretty much, she uses a 40-mm gun that fires projectiles (plastic cylinders with metal plates) with gunpowder or compressed helium that reach velocities of up to 2.7 km/s (that’s 6000 mph!), and these experiments are over in a microsecond (but take days to set up). She does all of this in her Shock Compression Lab, and while she joked that it would be nice to have undergraduates manning the gun 24/7, after hearing what can be done with liquid nitrogen over dinner, she decided that probably wouldn’t be a good idea :). This was personally exciting for me because I’m from Tucson, and I’ve been excited about the Lander since I was in high school and we would get posters and sticker to put on our Chemistry lab books from the University of Arizona (I considered having my mom dig up my Honors Chemistry book and take a picture of it. It was blue and shiny with a huge Phoenix sticker on top).

Thursday morning I had a two and a half hour lab meeting, which was slightly longer than normal, but it was in our new meeting room with super-comfortable chairs (at least I think so). Of course, we have a really nice system where the two people presenting bring in breakfast foods (normally bagels and donuts from Dunkin Donuts and some sort of fruit or pie) and the rest of us get to eat. Later I had a meeting with my PI, Dr. Sanes, to update him on my project because he is going on sabbatical fall semester to Cambridge University.

I also did some more exploring in our new building, which will eventually house Life Sciences 100r, IGEM, labs for MCB 52 and 54, and other classes.
Looking up the stairs from basement level one (there are apparently four basement levels)


Friday I was really excited because it was 8-8-08: the start of the 2008 Olympics. PRISE fellow Jack ’11 had set up a liquid nitrogen ice cream making session right before the opening ceremonies started at 7:30, and we all crowded into the G-Tower common room to watch the opening ceremonies together. Continuing with my Olympic coverage, the Men’s 400 Freestyle on Sunday night was amazing! “We’re going to smash the Americans. That’s what we came here for.” Yeah, that didn’t work out for the French so well. :) (Picture of Phelps courtesy of NBCOlympics.com)


Finally, there have been lots of other PRISE fellow-initiated activities going on. This weekend, there was a trip to Six Flags New England on Saturday and a hike in the White Mountains on Sunday. Since I am rather afraid of roller coasters and don’t know if I would have survived the hike, I wasn’t able to participate in those, but here’s a picture of the group at the ridge (from PRISE fellow Brad Seiler).


What I did do was head over to a lab party on Sunday with the two other undergrads (and PRISE fellows) who work in my lab – Jenn ’09 and Iris ’10. Our PI is going on sabbatical to Cambridge (the one across the Atlantic) fall semester, so he had a party at his apartment for our lab. There was a buffet with ribs (everyone’s favorite), chicken, mashed potatoes, corn bread, and lots of other goodies - and a lot of laughing. It was really nice to finally meet all the people who make my lab the great place it is and hear a little about their lives.

I'm On My Way

(Again, this entry is one week late! I’m sorry)

I had a pretty good week – with a lot of sleeping - because I haven’t been to lab since last Wednesday. That’s right – I got a week off because of our lab move from the Sherman Fairchild Biochemistry Building to the new Northwest Building. When I went in Thursday morning, there were crates, boxes, and people – both from our lab, from the moving company, and from IT – everywhere!
The pile of boxes next to my bench


My new desk

My new bench

The outside of the Northwest Building! Our lab is on the third floor.


Before I got back to work at lab, I had to get to work on my PRISE Presentation for our Presentation Practicum Monday night. We were divided into tables and given 10 minutes to talk about our research and receive feedback on our presentations from our peers. I found the night really helpful, and here are a few pictures taken by our Program Assistant Stephanie:




On Thursday it was The Cheescake Factory’s $1.50 cheesecake slice day, and I was really excited about this. However, you had to dine in (you couldn’t just go the the counter and order a slice of cheesecake and leave), so I gave up on that idea. Instead, later this week I went to UNO’s with Frank ’10 and Qi’11 where I had a Mini Dessert version of their famous Ice Cream Cookie :) Yum!

Thursday night was still exciting, because our Distinguished Speaker that night was Noam Elkies – who, just as a short introduction, received his PhD at the age of 20 and became the youngest tenured professor at Harvard at 26! Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the grand piano out, but his talk on math and music (specifically, on canons) was still amazing – and many non PRISErs from the Harvard community attended as well.

NWL

(This entry is two weeks late – I apologize!)

You’re probably wondering what NWL stands for. Well, like I mentioned in previous entries, my lab (Dr. Josh Sanes) as well as some other labs (Dr. Jeff Lichtman and Dr. Takao Hensch) are moving to the new Northwest Building and hence the Northwest Labs (NWL). I have never worked in a lab that moved while I was there (although my high school lab partly transferred to Cambridge University), so I found this pretty exciting. Of course, I didn’t really have to pack anything, but the last couple of days before the move involved a lot of maneuvering around piles of boxes and crates :)I said goodbye to my old desk and looked on the blueprint to find my new desk ("Alissa" between "Lilley" and "Valdez" - note that only the undergraduates are referred to by first name :) )


Monday night we had a wonderful panel on “Careers Off the Bench” – scientists who received their PhD but then went into the private sector. The panel was composed of Mary Lynne Hedley, the Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for MGI Pharma, Incorporated; Stacie Weninger (who received her PhD from Harvard in ’99), the director of science programs at Fidelity Foundations (and previously a senior scientist at Neuron (!)); and Brenda Jarrell, a partner with Choate, Hall, and Stewart who “practices intellectual property law specifically for scientific enterprises” (Brenda is the daughter of Nobel Laureate Dudley Herschbach and Dean Georgene Herschbach, both of whom also attended the talk!). Although I was pretty tired, I was captivated by the stories of these three women, especially their choice to stray from the typical path and their difficulties with balancing their careers and their families.

Three days later, our Distinguished Speaker Series continued with Dr. Thomas Michel, the new Dean of Education at Harvard Medical School, who came and talked to us about his work on NO (nitric oxide) and ended with a very interesting explanation of why fireflies light up. The title of his talk (intended to keep us awake) was “Nitric Oxide: a key signaling molecule in sex, death, and vascular biology”. He preceded the main portion of his talk with 5 key points on how to do well in science: ask important questions, don’t think about it – just do it!, believe in your hypothesis – create your own luck, don’t be afraid of new approaches, and, most of all, have fun! We all laughed when he said, “I like to use drugs in lab,” (of course, not in the illegal drug sense), and he ended with what I felt was an important remark: “Beware that things can sometimes be even more interesting than you may imagine.”

Walking around Cambridge and Boston, it’s very obvious that there is a lot of Red Sox spirit – whether in the form of hats, foam fingers, shirts, or banners. However, as I was walking back from lab the other day I saw this car’s license plate and had to pull out my cell phone to take a picture of it.



I have also noticed that Harvard Square is home to some giant dogs. The first dog, whose owner had a hat out for tips, I saw on PRISE move-in weekend. The second dog I stumbled across just last weekend, and its owners were in the process of convincing worried parents that their toddler would be safe petting it.

My favorite part of last week was definitely dinner with my PI, Dr. Sanes. Since PRISE encourages the Fellows to invite their PI’s to dinner at Dudley House, Iris, Jenn, and I (the three undergrads and PRISErs) in the lab, wanted to invite Dr. Sanes. However, he took us out to dinner at Chez Henri, a really good restaurant between Harvard and Porter Squares! It was great to get to know Dr. Sanes better, and we spent 2 ½ hours talking and laughing over our dinner before Dr. Sanes biked home and the three of us ran back to Leverett House in the rain :)

nananana BATMAN

PRISE is already half over! That means we have to start thinking about our presentations, which was the theme of both of our talks this past week – our Seminar Series and our Distinguished Speaker Series.


Our Seminar was on ‘Presenting Research and Public Speaking’ and was given by Rebekah Maggor from the Bok Center. She helped us learn how to write abstracts for science research, and spent much of the talk bringing student volunteers (and non-volunteers ☺ ) up to the podium to deliver their abstracts, receive feedback, and then deliver it again – in all cases, with much improvement.


On Thursday, Dean Stephen Kosslyn, chair of the Psychology Department, came and talked to us about the ‘The Dirty Dozen’ - The Twelve Most Common Powerpoint Errors: Pointless Powerpoints, Wrong Audience, Bad Structure, Not Enough Direction, Too Much Material, Too Small or Indistinct, Too Busy, Too Few Graphics, Murmurs and Monotones, Talking to the Screen (don’t you hate it when all you see is someone’s back and their back covers the actual powerpoint?), Derailed by Questions, and Stressing the Audience. If you want to know more, pick up a copy of his book, ‘Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling Powerpoint Presentations’, which all of us PRISEers received at the end of the night (I even got mine autographed – Sweet!). We all laughed when he joked at the beginning, “You all understand that Psychology is a science” and later when he said, “There are so many talks where they end with ‘Well, I guess that’s all for now’, and I wonder, ‘Well, what else is there for later?’” (Book image courtesy of Barnes and Nobles)

In between these two presentations, I had an amazing experience – I attended Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience at TD Northbank Garden Wednesday night. Since not all of PRISE was able to go, I was really lucky to get off the wait list (45 minutes before we had to leave!) and didn’t know what to expect. A group of us met up at the Harvard Square T Stop

and later met up with another group coming in from Longwood. We got our seats just as the lights dimmed and the show began! The dinosaurs were HUGE and pretty realistic, and the special effects were just as good. Unfortunately, we weren’t supposed to take pictures, but here’s one from my cell phone:

My question is how they manage to take these dinosaurs apart and transport them from city to city (when I was in New York last week, so many taxis and all the banners outside Madison Square Garden had ads for the show).

On Friday lab cleanup continued as I helped my postdoc Brendan clean out our fridge as well as the fridges and refrigerators in the cell culture room. Cleaning out our own fridge wasn’t too bad (we did need a scissor to pick away at some of the ice…), but we had to resort to drastic measures to get everything out of the cell culture freezer, namely, a stop hammer, which apparently plays a critical role in the movie Shawshank Redemption (I haven’t seen it, but I will).

I didn’t have time to see it over the weekend because I saw a different movie – The Dark Knight. Everyone I knew couldn’t wait for this movie to come out (according to Aditi ’10, every ticket in NYC was sold out). I saw Batman Begins, didn’t really like Katie Holmes, and thought it was an okay movie overall (the butler and Fox were my favorite). However, this movie was amazing, and Heath Ledger played the Joker almost too well - the poster creeps me out! (Images courtesy of Google Images)


It was intense! I don’t want to give anything away, but if you haven’t seen it already, you should. The headline on the Metro this morning said it broke box office records and swept the Spiderman movies away.

Saturday I also took part in the PRISE Cultural Food tour, heading to Sultan’s Kitchen on State Street with a bunch of other PRISE fellows. I had Tandoori Chicken Kebab and Baklavah and it was delicious! Another group headed to Midwest Grill on Sunday, and the last PRISE initiated event this weekend was the Dodgeball game, which apparently involved 1000 water balloons and a lot of soaking wet PRISEers (of course, the torrential downpour Sunday afternoon probably didn’t help!)

A Whale of a Tale

I can’t believe it’s already Monday and I still haven’t blogged about what happened last week. Well, here goes!


On Monday, we PRISE fellows had a good talk with Craig Rogers from the Bureau of Study Counsel about Managing Expectations in the Lab. One of the points I took away from the talk was that we should not feel burdened by our Harvard degree – that we should not have to go on to do what we and others see as bigger and better things because we went to Harvard. After the talk, some of my PRISE friends and I (Sara '11 and Chris '11 pictured here) visited Annenburg during Brain Break (for the Summer School kids) and thought back fondly to our freshman year meals.

A few days later my Thursday schedule was switched up by Lab Cleanup Day (!). As I’ll detail in a later entry, my lab, along with Prof. Lichtman’s lab and a couple others, are moving to the new Northwest Building next week. This meant that we had to cut our Thursday morning lab meeting short and spend a good 2-3 hours cleaning up common areas like the cell culture room, cold room, and dissection room, as well as starting to sort through the refrigerators and freezers. I wasn’t much help in this clean up as I haven’t been around long enough to know what I’m supposed to be cleaning, and would probably have ended up throwing away all the important things. Luckily, at lunch time we all got pizza in the tea room and one of the postdocs daringly drank a beer found in the cold room. (Good idea? I don’t know – it had apparently been there for at least a year!)


Thursday evening we attended another talk, this time by Professor Richard Losick, known to undergraduates for teaching MCB 52 and being co-Head Tutor of the Molecular and Cellular Biology Concentration. He spent the first 10 minutes convincing us that it’s a great idea to do research as undergraduates (he even showed us pages of his senior thesis from when he was at Princeton!). We all laughed in agreement when he said, “If you were a doctor and failed 95% of the time, that would be unacceptable. In science, failure is the norm. Your experiments will fail 95% of the time.” He also joked, “It’s really good I got a tablet [PC] because otherwise I’d have to use two pointers,” twisting his arms while referring to the two projector screens on either side of him. Most of his talk was about stochastic switches in Bacillus subtilis, a bacteria closely related to anthrax. Since I did research on B. subtilis for most of high school, this talk was pretty cool ☺


The next day, I left lab early and packed up my bags (well, just an overstuffed back-pack) and headed to South Station to take Megabus (free wireless!) to New York City (I first considered taking the Fung Wah, but decided it was in my own best interest to take a safer mode of transportation). Max ’10, Lauren ’11, and I were visiting Aditi ’10, who managed to get a three-bedroom apartment to herself (!) We got into Penn Station about 10:00 pm and headed back to her apartment, which was located about 12 stops away on the metro, drank some orange tangerine juice, and fell asleep with the help of a giant inflatable mattress.
The next morning we woke up refreshed, ate some Special K cereal, and put on our sunglasses.

We then started our journey on the New York Metro.

Our first top was Times Square, where we took lots of pictures of Elmo and WALL-E.


After a quick lunch at Cosi, we passed by the Apple store (Max '10 was really excited)

and walked a good couple of miles along Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Along the way, we passed a 20 block-long line for the Bon Jovi concert that evening.

The Museum was pretty sweet, and our favorite exhibits were probably Arms and Armor and Superheroes, which featured Tobey Maguire’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Spidey suits from Spiderman 3, Christopher Reeve’s Superman Suit, and Christian Bale’s Batman suit from Batman Begins (unfortunately, no pictures were allowed in the Superheroes exhibit).
We would have been awesome knights during the Crusades.

We were psyched to see Ellsworth Kelly in the Modern Art exhibit (he has single color canvases - genius?)


...as well as Andy Warhol (chicken noodle or tomato?)

After indulging in some Dippin’ Dots in the cafeteria,

we met up with Ap ’10, Steven ’10, Katherine ’10, and James ’10 (all of The Crimson Business Board) and tried to decide on a good spot for dinner.
We ended up in Union Square at The Heartland Brewery, where I had my usual chicken fingers.

We then headed over to Magnolia Bakery for some delicious frosted cupcakes!

The next morning I woke up ridiculously early to catch the 8:30 am bus back to South Station.

I got in about 12:45, and I then took the Red Line to the Green Line to the Blue Line and made it to New England Aquarium in time to go whale watching with PRISE. Now, I had head a lot about this whale watching, and I was a little worried about getting seasick. My only real boat experience was last summer when I was on a dinner cruise on the Potomac River, and I didn’t get seasick then, so I naïvely assumed I would be fine. The sea breeze was great as we pulled out of the harbor, leaving the city of Boston behind us, and it was amazing to see 5 humpback whales – a mom, her baby, and an escort, and then two other females. Unfortunately, I soon began to feel a little dizzy, which turned into nausea, leaving me sitting on one of the benches breathing in and out slowly so as not to get really sick (as some fellow PRISEers did). All in all it was a good experience, although I don’t think the Voyager III will be seeing me again soon.