by Amy Beth Prager

I faced a challenge perhaps unique to all of the blog writers. While at MIT, I lived in a dorm with suitemates for the first time
in quite a long while. However, this was not the greatest challenge of my living circumstances. I am transgendered, and this was my first time ever living with genetic females. I looked forward to my experience with both anticipation and trepidation. What if they found out about my secret? What if there were manifestations of my behavior that gave my past away? How would they react? How would I adjust? I found that all of my questions had answers, and all of my answers had questions.

To my enormous surprise and relief, nothing averse happened. Not only was there no negative reaction to my previous gender, but my suitemates and I also strongly bonded and I had the best suitemate/dorm/living arrangement that I had ever had! It was a great learning experience about the issues that genetic women face in their lives, which as a result of my
cohabitation, I got to glimpse in enormous detail and I gained tremendous insight into what it means to be a woman in a way that I could not and have not had in any other way.

by Natalie Punt

Every weekday morning I drove fifteen minutes to lab. Not a bad commute, except I passed summer on the way. Friends and family were going to the beach, taking vacations, boating at the lake and leisurely shopping. Our summers briefly
intersected on my drive to the lab where I spent my summer learning statistics and analyzing functional protein domains. The greatest challenge I faced this summer was not a co-variant statistics problem or a misbehaving experiment, it was working over the summer.

Summer is a continual celebration. I love finding the best beaches to go to with my friends, talking late into warm summer nights, shopping summer retail sales, hiking and camping and going on trips to new places. Despite the promises to myself and friends that my summer research would not dominate my summer life, I knew my summer would be severely limited.

by Pin-Wen Wang

This summer, I really wanted a challenge. I wanted to do something I had never done before, and so… I ended up in Germany. I had never learned in German before, had little to no knowledge of German culture, and couldn’t even tell you which city I was going to be living in. I wasn’t going to Europe as part of a program, and really just had no idea what was ahead of me. I remember sitting on the plane, a few hours before departure, and all I kept asking myself was “what have I gotten myself into?”

Two and a half months later, I’m sitting in the comfort of my own home, reflecting on my time in Germany, the times I stayed late in the lab analyzing data, the times my coworkers and I laughed and talked over jumbo cocktail drinks until midnight, and the times I spent traveling around Europe with just my loyal red backpack and a folded map. So what was a challenge for me?

by Pin-Wen Wang

Is it possible to say that a “place” has inspired me this summer? Throughout my time in the Lorke lab, my professor, my supervisor, and all the other master students and Ph.D. students have been instrumental in helping me enjoy my time in Germany. Through their collective kindness, I’ve had the opportunity to actually become part of the lab and part of this “graduate” school culture where there are constant jokes about the amount of coffee they drink. But, alas, I should stick with one person that has really inspired me this summer. I thought about it for a long time, and I decided that I would pick someone not from the lab. Instead, I want to talk about Volker (http://ffindr.com/en/player/germany/volker-gruen), an amazing ultimate Frisbee player who I had the pleasure of playing with on the Duisburg Frisbee team (Du bist Frisbee).

by Natalie Punt

My inspirations and motivation come from many sources. Good science especially motivates me. Science that changes the frontier of knowledge and how it is applied inspires me to challenge what I know and drives me to create. I am also
inspired by the knowledge, drive and courage of innovative scientists whom change the way we think about science through their ideas.

It’s no surprise that my greatest sources of inspiration are the scientists who have changed their respective fields with their ideas, especially in genomics. Genomics, or the study of all the genes that make up an organism, is changing faster than Moore’s law predicted. Innovations within genomics are profoundly influencing technology, biology and medicine. I am inspired by the prominent scientists in this field, such as Elaine Ostrander, Vadim Gladyshev, Eric Lander and George Church. Their findings contribute to multiple fields and technology. For example, in the process of developing the complete sequence of the dog’s genome, Elaine Ostrander identified genes responsible for the dog’s unique biology and contributed to the development of genome sequencing technology.

by Riana Balahadia

There have been several interesting people working with me this summer. However, the most inspiring and determined person I’ve met would have to be Dr. Janina Galler. Dr. Galler is the director and brains behind the Barbados Nutrition Study and is essentially my “boss.” Over 42 years ago, she came up with the premise of a having a longitudinal study to determine the effects of early malnutrition in Barbadian children. Today, that study (the Barbados Nutrition Study) has had numerous publications on novel findings about different topics, and acts as a reference for present research. It currently collaborates with other labs and professionals to gain a consummate view of perinatal malnutrition’s effects on later life. Indeed, founding and managing such a large, complicated study are enough reasons to admire someone. Yet it is Dr. Galler’s personal story and dual role as a supportive mother that connect with me most.

by Shaira Bhanji

It’s about 9AM at St. John’s Research Institute (SJRI) when a smiling lady in a colorful, neatly pleated sari walks in to her office. Dr. Tinku Thomas, M.Sc, Ph.D., (nicknamed “Tinks”) is a biostatistician and assistant professor at SJRI. It was around the second week of my internship at St. John’s Research Institute that I really began to get to know Tinku. I and two other interns effectively moved into her office for the summer…and we were grateful that we did.

Our summer task involved learning how to use statistical software called SPSS (the program Stata is its counterpart). The purpose of SPSS was to help me make sense of a huge database of 2,000 pregnant women that included various body measurements, those of their babies, and data from food frequency questionnaires including every food group I could imagine. Needless to say, I at times felt like I was in over my head, drowning in waves of variables that overflowed like the Ganges.

by Rabeea Ahmed

What thirty minutes with Dr. Adam Riess Taught Me:

This week, I was fortunate enough to be given the chance to speak with Dr. Adam Riess on his work and research experiences. Dr. Riess won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”[1] I came upon this opportunity by chance – it just so happened that Dr. Riess works at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) [1] ,where I was interning this summer, and was kind enough to agree to meeting with me to share his thoughts on research.

During my meeting with Dr. Reiss, I had the chance to exchange great information about scientific research, the challenges of the field and his method of research. I will summarize some of the things I learned from his company in this blog.

1. “Asking Too Many Questions Is Good”

by Pin-Wen Wang

I think that out of everything I’ve learned, the concept of photoluminescence is probably the single most important fundamental (but not complex) concept that I needed to understand to help me with my research. When you break up the word photoluminescence, it’s just “photo” and “luminescence”. Luminescence is the phenomenon of a material giving off light. “Photo” refers to photons or packets of energy that, in physics, quantifies the energy that creates light. What photoluminescence of a material refers to, then, is a material’s ability to give off light by giving off these packets of energy.

A very similar concept is bioluminescence, which can be likened to the way a firefly gives off light, by biological/chemical processes within its body. For my research, I needed to count how many photons were given off by “my” nanoparticle materials when I agitate the material with a laser, giving the material energy. The number of photons that are given off though isn’t constant, nor does it follow a well defined curve. That’s where my research comes in.

by Shaira Bhanji

It’s no surprise that a mother’s nutrition is important to the health of her baby. It may, however, be surprising that the complications of a poor birth outcome do not stop at birth, but may come back to haunt the child’s adult life. Indeed, the well-known Barker’s hypothesis (also know as the Fetal Origins or Thrifty Phenotype hypothesis) states exactly this—that poor growth of the fetus during pregnancy leaves babies at higher risk of chronic disease later in life. Such diseases include type 2 diabetes, for example.

I imagine being pregnant is hard enough even without having to worry about eating the right combination of nutrients to protect one’s baby more than fifty years after birth. And in some places, getting the right nutrients is harder than in others.