"By periodical and migratory meetings, to promote intercourse between those who are cultivating science in different parts of the United States....To give a stronger and... more systematic direction to scientific research in our country." - Louis Agassiz, on the founding of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848 Last weekend I got to attend two wonderful conferences, one right after another. Both were student-focused, and so presenters offered not only summaries of the science taking place in their labs, but also valuable career advice. I plan to make a blog post about each. First and foremost, of course, SCIENCE!
The first conference I attended was the HHMI Med Into Grad Symposium hosted by the Leder Human Biology program at Harvard Medical School. The theme of the Symposium was "Metabolism: Fueling Translational Research." It was a pleasure to attend. I really enjoyed the chance to meet other translational PhD students from universities across the Northeast, and the talks were fascinating. The theme of several of the talks was diabetes and obesity. I was struck by how every single one of the speakers wanted to turn the conventional models on their heads, in order to approach this ancient problem with new eyes and fresh optimism. The fabulous presenters included Dr. David Ludwig, who advocates changing the view of cause & effect in obesity, so that the traditional advice to "just eat less and exercise more" is not only doomed to fail, but potentially harmful. Dr. Sudha Biddinger showed compelling molecular data that argued that in type II diabetes, the community has focused overly much on glucose, and that to prevent cardiovascular disease, we should perhaps be paying attention to FMO3 and the FOXO1 signaling pathway instead. And Dr. Morris Birnbaum advocated for a new model of insulin resistance, focusing on increased glucose in the liver causing higher levels of insulin, which overwhelms the system and causes defective insulin signaling. These creative approaches highlight the importance of scientists daring to question their forebears and approach old problems in new ways. I was also seriously impressed by the student presenters at MiG, a group which I was honored to be part of. If you had asked me about metabolism just a few months ago, I would have shuddered at the memory of biochemistry classes that failed to ignite my curiosity for anything smaller than a protein. After seeing these students present their work on a myriad of important translational topics in metabolism, I can say I am very happy that metabolism data managed to worm its way into my own project. Perhaps it is just post-conference glow, but it is hard to think of a topic more relevant to the health of living organisms than the creation and consumption of energy. On the second half my four-day weekend, I attended my graduate program's CSB retreat, which featured a wider range of topics. Dr. Zhipeng Wang presented extremely interesting work on detecting structural DNA variants from short-reads in Whole Genome Sequencing, Dr. Wendy Gilbert showcased her lab's work on differences in our RNA translation efficiency (something that I feel deserves more attention in our gene-expression-obsessed field), Dr. Brenton Graveley talked about alternative splicing in the Drosophila gene DSCAM (using the exciting new MinION sequencing platform!), and Dr. Otto Cordero described his new lab at MIT, where he focuses on modeling the ecological dynamics of microbes. We also heard from my awesome fellow students and, most interestingly, from program alumni (more on that in Part 2). For my own part, at both conferences I presented my work on OmicsIntegrator, a tool that the Fraenkel lab created to analyse several types of high-throughput data in one sample. It was a great experience to present my work (my first time speaking at a conference outside of my undergrad institution!), and to very engaged audiences. I was very pleased to see that several students seemed to be interested in trying our tool in their own projects. Attending well-organized conferences never fails to inspire me in my own work, and speaking at these conferences actually deepened my engagement with the conference as a whole. I took the opportunity to jot down ideas for my project as they occurred to me, and I hope to incorporate several of these into my work in the coming months. It is times like these I remember to think of science as a community, and to value opportunities to engage with it.
1 Comment
10/15/2015 02:54:39 pm
HUH??...[So Glad YOO, caught that!!]~ xxooxx hugs alla us xxoo
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AuthorAmanda Kedaigle's work in the Broad Institute focuses on leveraging brand new biological data modalities to study novel models of human brain development. Archives
February 2022
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