ICAhN Think and Drink is coming back in September for another year of cutting edge science talks and we need YOUR HELP putting together an exciting and integrative line-up. Talks will be held at 4:30 PM every other Wednesday in CIL 101. The format will be the same as last year, featuring two 20-minute talks from postdocs, students, fellows, or staff scientist with a break for refreshments.

This is a great opportunity for postdocs and students to present their work to an interdisciplinary group of scientists and a chance for presenters and attendees to get to know labs outside of their usual circles. Last year we had talks from ~25 labs from Mol Bio to Physics and even Geosciences! Everyone is welcome. Please CONTACT US if you are interested in giving a talk at ICAhN Think & Drink in 2016-2017! 

It’s been nearly a month since the last Think and Drink (we took a week off due to spring break) and there have been a few changes to our plans. Our April 6th talk has proved to be quite difficult to schedule. Unfortunately, one of our original speakers had a last minute scheduling conflict, so I (Amanda) will be filling the spot. This means that we will have two oogenesis/early development talks.  The first from Julie Merkle of the Schüpbach lab will address fundamental questions in germline regulation and gamete formation in Drosophila. My talk will deal with the long standing problem of DNA-to-cytoplasm ratio sensing during the Mid-Blastula Transition in Xenopus with just a bit of our more recent Drosophila work.

Both talks from 2/3 were thoroughly enjoyable and will be hard to top. Though, if I know anyone who can do it, it is my co-organizer Emilia Esposito. Emilia will be stepping up next Think and Drink to fill a spot left open by an unforeseen scheduling conflict. Emilia had originally been included in the spring semester lineup, but graciously gave up her spot in order to allow a greater diversity of labs to present within our limited number of meetings this semester. Since Think and Drink aims to foster interdisciplinary connections we felt that it was important to have labs from the widest variety of fields and departments possible. Now, by a twist of fate she’s back on the schedule and we’ll get the chance to hear about her work on the interactions between spatially restricted transcription factors and chromatin during mitosis before she graduates this year.

In addition to Emilia we will be having one of those aforementioned interdisciplinary talks that we get so excited about. Oliver Baars of the Morel group in the Geosciences department will be joining us to tell us about identifying new metallophores in natural bacterial populations.

It’s great to see some of the natural and unexpected synergies that surface at think and drink. Last week was a great example of a talk about modeling of bacterial competition for metabolites followed by a very experimental talk on the actual free energies of various metabolic reactions. Hopefully we are succeeding in fostering new contacts within the institute and related departments.

For our next Think & Drink on February 3 we will have two very different talks. The first from Henry Mattingly (of the Shvartsman lab) will explain his work on how different levels processivity affect multisite phosphorylation. Then Sudarshan Chari (Ayroles lab) will tell us about compensatory evolution in wing development mutants of Drosophila.

2016 promises to be a great year for Think & Drink. We’ve worked very hard to secure a diverse lineup of high quality speakers. We got off to an excellent start last week with Tess and Shilpa’s stories about chromatin and transcription factors across development and species.

I also wanted to thank everyone who came out to show their support for the undergrads at the QCB 302 symposium. The students worked very hard to produce excellent presentations and it was great to see so much of the QCB community show up to support them.

Join us on January 20, for Thibaud Taillefumier of the Wingreen lab who will tell us about bacterial populations of different metabolic types coexist while competing for fixed resources and Lukas Tanner from the Rabinowitz lab who will discuss regulation of glycolytic flux in mammalian cells.