The Role of Small Molecules in Biology
After a very long delay, I have updated most of the website. The problem with this sort of delay is that not only are things out of date but also that I forget how to update the site! The website is hosted on GitHub and uses Jekyl. Thus, everything is put together with code and uses markdown language. It can be hard to remember, especially for an old guy like me…
My former PhD student, Olatomiwa Bifarin (Bif), is now a postdoc at Georgia Tech in Facundo Fernandez’s lab. Bif recently won the Best Research Talk Award from the GT postdoctoral research symposium! Congratulations, Bif!!
Max Colonna has been working with a team of investigators from [CMaT] (https://cellmanufacturingusa.org){:target=”_blank”} to better understand factors that influence quality of T cells for therapy. Max performed NMR analysis on the media from T cell cultures, and the team associated those measurements–along with many others–with function. The work was recently published in Bioengineering & Translational Medicine
Congratulations to Deanna Lanier for being selected to the NIH Glycoscience Training Program!
Happy New Year!
We have partnered with the GRA to start a new pilot project called GRA Student Scholars. This program will provide undergraduate students who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM with an opportunity to conduct extensive research in a GRA or partnering labs. Congratulations to Kyra Chism and Rockford Watkins in our lab, who are two of the founding GRA Student Scholars! Here is a GRA blog post that features Kyra and provides more information on the program.
Congratulations to the VIP team for getting their first team publication! This is a nice micropublication reporting a new assay for 1-HP toxicity in C. elegans. Nice Job, team!
The GRA is developing a strategy to reach out to K-12 students to get them interested in careers in science. They have established a video series called Xplorers that are interviews with grad students in some Georgia universities. They cover topics such as “What exactly is university research” and “What do you do in the Lab?”. Our own Olatomiwa Bifarin (Bif) is featured in these! Congrats, Bif, and thanks for representing our lab and UGA!
After seeing what I thought was a really nice website, I contacted Meren to ask him how he did it. He then told me all about jekyll, which is hosted by GitHub. This sounded interesting and provided an opportunity for me to learn more about a bunch of things (which is why I went into science in the first place). I spent a week or so during the break trying to learn how to build a site. I got close enough to be dangerous, and I kept on breaking things. Then I found a very talented UGA CS student, Shophine Sivaraja, who patiently listened to my ideas, taught me how to better use GitHub, and built the core site. Once it is established, it is nice to use, because updates are pretty simple and primarily use the markdown language, which is amazingly powerful. My goal now is to try to keep this new site somewhat current, rather than the every 2 year update that I usually manage…