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.

For example, my suitemates shared with me details of their personal lives. I learned of traumatic events in their lives as a
result of psychological mistreatment and how they are dealing with them. It is significant to note that this trauma was inflicted on them by men. This by no means is meant to suggest that men are all bad or in some way emotionally inferior to women. However, it does reinforce a growing sense within me that we were all in this together, and that we were different from them. In fact, that is the whole concept and definition of gender identity in the first place, “us women” as opposed to “them men”.

I found that through my living arrangements, as well as my presence in Cambridge allows me to participate far more extensively in groups such as Scientista I have grown to identify far more strongly with females than ever before, which is quite startling when you consider that it was my internal sense of gender identity that drove me to become so involved with
Scientista in the first place. Perhaps this goes to prove that gender identity is due to external conditions (“nurture” opposed to “nature”) more than previously thought. It is indeed an interesting hypothesis to ponder.

There is a raging debate going on in academic circles about the formation of gender identity, is it inborn and innate, or is
it learned through same gender experiences? There are some that may argue that it is biologically determined and unchangeable. However, a growing number of scientists believe that it is acquired through bonding experiences with same
gender peers. For example, proponents of this theory argue that experiences such as boy scouts, gender segregated camps, schools and dorms can “cure” transsexuality in a young genetically male child. My experiences living in gender segregated dorms and my involvement in gender segregated groups (i.e. Scientista) suggests (quite ironically, if you desire my opinion) that there is some truth to this, as I fell much more than a woman than ever before.

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.

In fact, the decision to work over the summer was made that previous summer. I understood that my first summer of veterinarian school would be the ideal time to establish a research project before clinical rotations predominate my time
and limit my ability to do a meaningful research project. Receiving a summer research grant was the concluding agreement to spend my summer working on a research project. 

There were several advantages to doing a summer research project. First, it is an opportunity to work on a novel problem. Very little research has been done on the genetics underlying the anti-cancer phenotype of the Naked Mole Rat. Doing
research in a new field allowed me to make discoveries. Second, the flexibility of my program allowed me to ask my own questions and develop methods to find answers to my questions. The intellectual freedom to pursue my own questions was
the greatest attribute of my research project. In the past I have followed a senior investigator’s agenda and had not been able to follow my own interests. Lastly, I was able to present my work at a major National Institute of Health-Merial Veterinarian meeting where I could meet other scholars and preview new advances in animal science. 
 
The greatest disadvantage of my summer research was the lack of a summer and a vacation. To accomplish the goals set forth in my project, I had to learn how to perform several types of statistical analysis and operate several computational predictive programs. Although my data set was not relatively large, it did take a significant amount of time to manually inspect. The short period of time available for research before school started demanded an intense pace to accomplish my goals. 

However, my summer is not lost! There are still three weeks of summer remaining, which is plenty of time to go to the beach, camp and shop. Best of all, many of my friends are back on campus for school with many celebrations ensuing. I’ve even
booked a trip to Iceland for fall.
 
In retrospect, you can work over the summer and still have your summer. I didn’t spend every minute working- I did schedule short trips to the beach, small local hikes and watched a movie. Yet more importantly, I was able to do work on a rewarding research project and accomplish the aim of the project to identify cancer related proteins that are different in their amino acid sequence between an animal that is immune to cancer and those that are susceptible to cancer.

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?

Was it not knowing the language, getting lost in Munich, or misreading the calibration on my lab experiment? Long story short, I felt like my whole summer was an exciting challenge every day. At times, maybe two or three weeks into my
stay, I would feel like I was getting the hang of buying food before the stores closed and gathering data for my experiments without forgetting a step, but every day there was always something that I hadn’t learned. I didn’t know that the side street got to my lab a little faster than my usual route. I didn’t know that the cashier was asking me whether or not I wanted a receipt. I didn’t know that turning off my monitor didn’t really affect my light-dark experiments. There was a lot that I didn’t know. 

Just a couple of short anecdotes:

Every Monday at lab, we have presentations; on my very first Monday I learned that apparently one doesn’t clap after a presentation; rather you’re supposed to knock on the table, a sound that when done by everyone in the room makes a solid
resonating applause, much more august than the clapping I was used to. These things I learned fast. 

In my experiments, it wasn’t until my last week in Germany, that I realized that I hadn’t fully understood how to calibrate the position of the laser. I had seen it done before, but when I needed to do it on my own, I wasn’t entirely sure how to turn the knob to get what I wanted. Some things you just don’t learn fast enough. 

Overall though, it was the mistakes and challenges that made the most lasting impact. I am really grateful to the lab for giving me the attention I needed but also giving me the chance to work individually and to design my own experiments. If not for the trust that they put in me in using their lab and the risks I took on my travels throughout Europe, I wouldn’t be sitting here today with such a different perspective on physics research and world cultures.

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).

Although he (Volker) only came to four practices during the whole time I was there, he has impacted me the most. The first time I met him, everyone made fun of him because he never showed up for practice, but whenever he did, he would have so much to say about the workout and everyone’s progress. The second time he came by, which happened to be a whole month later, I found out that he was actually a member of the German National team. Big deal! I know.

I respected him so much, and I didn’t even know a thing about him. The reason why Volker has had such a great influence on me though is the way he carries himself, and just the amount of attention and mentorship he gave me. In addition to being a great leader and playing to each individual’s strengths during scrimmages, he has a way of watching you play out of the corner of his eye and picks up on everything. After every point, he would tell me what I was doing right, what I could improve on. During drills, he was the first one to recognize my weakness in throwing fakes at the opponent, and immediately stopped the drill (mind you, he isn’t the trainer) to give me a push of motivation and just enough strictness to make me improve, almost
instantly.

I felt so honored to be able to play with someone like him who has had so much experience playing the sport. For someone like him to have the kind of patience he has with more unseasoned players like me is really phenomenal. I only started playing in college, and I sometimes get a little frustrated with less experienced players, but it seemed like Volker never got frustrated. He was always ready to teach us and help us grow. 

I have to say that out of my whole summer, he has taught me not only how to play better Frisbee but also how to carry myself as a leader, a teacher, and a student. It was the little things he did on the field that have left the greatest impression on me, and what I’ve learned from his kindness is the type of thing that I can adopt into any discipline, from being in the lab teaching
the newcomer how to use the lab apparatus to working and learning with my supervisor. Thanks Volker!

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.

Geneticists often take ask simple questions and use logical deductions to obtain their answers. As the amount of genomics data increases, geneticists rely upon sheer mathematical power to conduct their research. Genomics inspires me to keep my
science real and look for simple explanations to valid problems in medicine. Similarly, their creative approaches to answer research questions inspires me to be creative in my own research and daily life. 

It’s great having true revolutionaries working in your field to serve as daily doses of inspiration. However, I have sources of inspiration that are closer to home. I admire our Assistant Dean of Research, Dominique Griffon for her tireless work ethic and ambitious research plans. In addition, her commitment to a high level of standards inspires me to value my personal standards of quality and work relentlessly to achieve those standards despite criticism. My mentor, Kristopher Irizarry, inspires me to be brilliant on a daily basis and to have intellectual fun. Lastly, the creativity and work ethic my colleagues
demonstrate also inspire me to develop my personal style of research and productivity. 

Inspiration is often overridden by a constant stream of data analysis. Yet, without an idea, thought or mentor to inspire your research- there would be no data to analyze. Surrounding yourself with inspiration, such as the Scientista community can
motivate individuals be innovative and create science that changes the way we perceive the world.

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.

As a young girl, Dr. Galler immigrated to the United States from Sweden with her parents. Her parents spoke little English and knew little about the US—let alone what Harvard was. Neither was educated beyond elementary school, but both worked hard to give their children an education. It seems that Dr. Galler was greatly motivated by her interest in research from a young age. In fact, she led a life that would make every pre-med I know gape! Driven by pure curiosity she: began research in high school, finished undergraduate college in 2 years summa cum laude, led her own laboratory during her first year in medical school (at 19 years old), and was offered a grant by the National Institute of Health to do work in a developing country. This is also at a time where women were a rare presence in medicine and higher education. Now, despite her full-time job, Dr. Galler is also a dedicated mother to her three beautiful daughters—all of whom have impressive resumes as well. And I mean impressive. I can only image the dedication and time needed to accomplish her milestones. But after getting to know Dr. Galler, I can understand how her determined personality makes it possible.

Learning about Dr. Galler, as an immigrant and mother, really speaks to me on a personal level. My mother is a Filipino immigrant and a single mother. She completed her medical degree in the Philippines, but was unable to practice in the United States because she had to care for me. Despite our struggles, I consider myself to be very close to my mother and am appreciative of her hard work. Dr. Galler’s story lets me know that it is possible to be successful in the medical field and still be an involved mother. In addition, she shows that it is possible to work in a developing country in nutrition but still live in the States (I’ve toyed with the idea of working in the Philippines on nutrition). Overall, I am motivated by Dr. Galler’s story and success, and wish to strive for the same in my own life.

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.

What variable should I test first? Which test would be the best one to answer the questions we wanted to answer? Are we even asking the right questions? What are we trying to find? How is this study different from papers that have already been published on the topic? Running the tests in SPSS was not the hard part; the hard part was answering these questions and figuring out which of the hundreds of thousands of possible variations of tests to run.

Luckily, an expert bio-statistician—who not only helped me understand what we were doing, but also pushed me to lengths I didn’t think I could go—was mentoring me. I never thought I would conduct the data analysis for such a large cohort and write an accompanying scientific paper from scratch all in eight weeks. Indeed, another supervisor of ours exclaimed, “You’re undergraduates? Oh, I thought you were Ph.D. students!”

I was always impressed by Dr. Thomas’ patience, calmness, and clarity of direction and purpose. I was never afraid to ask her why we were doing what we were doing—especially because it was so easy to get lost in the hundreds of thousands of tests that we ran and to forget the intent of our study. Not only that, but when a test didn’t work quite right, she could quickly identify what had gone wrong…even with so many variables at play.

Dr. Thomas was always willing to take time out of her busy schedule (and I don’t just say this…she had people stopping in to see her every few minutes all day! A brain in high demand, indeed) to answer our sometimes-simple questions, and she did it with a smile. By the end of our internship, we joked that she would miss the hum of our computers and our soft-voiced chatter that was the backdrop of her office for two months. Thanks, Dr. Thomas!

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”

Dr. Riess and I talked about curiosity and how it leads to asking questions and creating more while trying to answer them.  Dr. Riess pointed out that it is a very good trait in a scientist to be passionately curious and ask very many questions. Indeed, Dr. Riess’s research was based on his curiosity about the state of the universe. From speaking to him, I could clearly see that he was fascinated about the subject and eager to learn more about it. As it turned out from my discussions with him, not only is a good trait to be passionately curious about the universe, it is also a virtue to preserve in answering those questions. Indeed, Dr. Riess’s research that culminated in his discovery of the accelerating universe took many years to complete.

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Share Your Ideas

In the course of my conversation, Dr. Riess pointed to a frame containing one of first publications of the exciting results he obtained from his study of the universe. He told me that at the time he published this paper, he was almost certain that someone would find and point out flaws in his theory or experiment, and that it was unlikely the idea would survive for very long. Surprisingly, Dr. Riess took a chance and the odds worked in his favor. I found Dr. Riess’s attitude towards criticism to be very inspiring. He was not intimidated by the prospect of being wrong. Rather, he seemed to think it a very natural part science research to be corrected and he looked at this as an opportunity to learn and refine his techniques.

3. Be Thorough, “Find Your Own Mistakes”

I asked Dr. Riess for his thoughts on making mistakes. Performing numerous experimental setups and calculations and such can sometimes result in human error; eleven weeks at STScI had taught me this lesson and I re-tested my ideas often. However, the chance that my results might be wrong made me quite nervous and I often re-checked my work before I gave final presentations and notes. I asked Dr. Riess if he found the process of re-testing hypothesis and re-doing experiments nerve-racking as well. As it turned out, at the beginning of his research, he did. However, he told me that he soon realized that he was happy with finding his mistakes himself. He advised me to feel comfortable with the process of re-testing and to not be bogged down by flaws and mistakes I found in my own work. In fact, he assured me that finding mistakes in one’s own research shows one’s competence in the field and reflects the care with which one conducts research. It is, as he mentioned, much better to find one’s own mistakes and try to fix them than have them pointed out just because one wasn’t careful enough to re-test thoroughly.

5. “It is OK to make mistakes”

Perhaps the most valuable take-home message from my meeting with Dr. Riess was his emphasis on perseverance.  He mentioned that “It is okay to make mistakes in science!” Adding to the famous Niels Bohr quote that “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field”, Dr. Riess said that, “A genius is a person who makes all the mistakes in a short amount of time.” In our conversation, he seemed to emphasize the need to feel comfortable with making mistakes and sees them as a great learning opportunity. Never once did I even hear Dr. Riess consider mistakes as a sign of failure. If anything, he seems to think highly of them as a great opportunity to improve.

Those were the lessons that I learned in thirty minutes with Dr. Adam Riess. I hope you find them as useful, inspiring and relevant as I did!


[1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/

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.

When I was charged with the task of characterizing nanoparticles, I struggled to understand why I was doing it. I didn’t know what type of experiments to design because I didn’t know what I wanted to see, simply because I didn’t know. We didn’t know how the nanoparticles would react or what they would do. I understood photoluminescence, but I didn’t understand the point of my research. Many times when I ask my supervisor questions about what I should be doing, he answers “if I knew the answers, we wouldn’t be doing the research”.

Through doing my research, I finally understand a whole new perspective of scientific research. It’s not really about understanding a complex concept that you only read about in textbooks. Textbooks provide you with stories, histories of what
past researchers have concluded. With my nanoparticles, learning how to use the apparatus and coding programs was not difficult. The most difficult part was trying to understand the graphs I was getting and explaining why these graphs behaved the way they do, and knowing some background information about the properties of metals and ways electrons behave in different materials. Understanding what photoluminescence is was a great jumping off point to start the journey of trying to understand something like nanoparticles.

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.

India is one such place, where many (but certainly not all) people are vegetarians or consume little meat—possibly leading to lower protein and vitamin B12 intake than desirable during pregnancy. Of course, it is important to mention that this is not true of all women in India, and these risks exist for vegetarians even outside of India. The bottom line is that nutrition during pregnancy is important. More importantly, protein[1] and B12 during pregnancy are important.[2]

And, even more specifically, the scientific literature on the topic shows the importance of milk during pregnancy.[3] What my team and I wanted to find out this summer was whether protein and B12 specifically from milk have any impact on a baby’s birth weight. In short, the answer is yes. Why is this exciting? Well, if we know the targeted gestational weight gain in India (weight gain of the mother during pregnancy), the recommended guidelines for protein and B12 intakes during pregnancy, and that milk is an important source of these two nutrients, then we are on our way to being able to prescribe an ideal quantity of daily milk intake for pregnant women—and perhaps more specifically, pregnant women in India. Being able to tell a woman how much milk she should be drinking during pregnancy is more quantifiable than recommending to her grams of protein and micrograms of B12 intake.

Thus, the team and I are moving to make pregnancy a little simpler in a country that has many and in which it is already difficult enough. The implications of something as simple as drinking milk every day of pregnancy could be much greater than anyone ever anticipated.


[1] Kramer M.S., Kakuma R., Energy and protein intake in pregnancy, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews [Internet] 2003. Available from: http://apps.who.int/rhl/reviews/CD000032.pdf .

[2] Muthayya S, Kurpad A, Duggan C, Bosch R, Dwarkanath P, Mhaskar A, Mhaskar R, Thomas A, Vaz M, Bhat S, et al. Low maternal vitamin B12 status is associated with intrauterine growth retardation in urban south Indians. Eur J Clin Nutri [serial online] 2006;60(6):791-801. Internet: http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v60/n6/full/1602383a.html.

[3] Heppe D. Maternal milk consumption, fetal growth, and the risks of neonatal complications: the generation R study. Am J Clin Nutr [serial online] 2011;94(2):501-9. Internet: http://www.ajcn.org/content/94/2/501.long.