You’re invited to the 2015-2016 QCB 302 Undergraduate Symposium. As the culmination of QCB 302, the students present their own original research seminars. This mini-symposium will feature 15 minute talks from 8 exceptional students on a variety of quantitative and computational biology topics. Come support these students and learn about the undergraduate research in QCB!
First, I want to thank Kai Chen for his help keeping the show running while Emilia is out of town. I could not do it alone. Yesterday’s talks complimented one another very nicely looking and I think everyone learned quite a lot (I know I did).
We have only one more Think & Drink in 2015, and it is next week, Dec. 16 at 4:30. We will be hearing from Jian Zhou of the Troyanskaya lab about the algorithmic framework that he has developed to predict chromatin effects of sequence alterations and Ben Rubin of the Kocher lab about the evolutionary effects of plant-ant mutualism. Both promise to be exciting talks, so let’s finish the year strong!
I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving break. Our pre-thanksgiving talks were rousing as always. Especially with Andy’s little one Max who slept like an angel during his father’s talk and woke up just at the end of the Q&A. Getting the hang of talks early in life!
Due to the Joshua Lederberg – John von Neumann Symposium: Towards Quantitative Biology taking place all day at the Institute for Advanced Study on Wednesday Dec. 2, we have pushed this week’s talk back one week to Wednesday, Dec. 9. The Dec. 9 talks will be feature Anne-Flo Bitbol of the Wingreen lab who will tell us about a novel method using protein sequence covariation to predict protien-protein interactions, and Shani Elbaum-Garfinkle of the Brangwynne lab who will tell us about the nature of Liquid-Like Organelles.
Despite the autumn break, the 11/4 think and drink was lively and well attended. The differences between the two talks nicely demonstrated the breadth of research here at the LSI. And we were even close to being on time for once.
The only hitch was a stolen pizza. In the future we will employ additional precautions to insure that no further pizzas are lost to miscreants. I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate that everyone is welcome at Think & Drink. So, pizza thieves, whoever you are, come have more free pizza, just stick around and learn some cool science while you’re at it (just watch out for Emilia, she’s pretty angry with your right now).
Our next seminar will be November 18, when we will be hearing from two Andrews. LSI fellow, Andy Leifer will tell us the really cool tools that he and his lab have been using to image neuronal activity in freely behaving animals and Andrew Bass of the Storey lab will explain a new method for optimizing statistical power in RNA-seq experiments.
Please note that due to scheduling conflicts we have moved the 12/2 seminar back one week to 12/9.
You may have noticed Emilia taking live action photos of the events of Think&Drink. They can now be seen in the new photo gallery. Look for yourself and your friends or see what you’ve been missing.
We’ve also had a schedule change. Andrew Bass has moved to 11/18, which means that we will be getting Ben Machta two weeks earlier on 11/4. He will tell us about mechanism of action of anesthetics by altering the properties of cell membranes. Ben will be joined by Kai Chen (of the Levine lab) who will tell us about the mechanisms of zygotic genome activation in Drosophila. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing both of these speakers present previously, and it 11/4 promises to be an exciting session.