Today’s feature rounds up the full trio of undergraduates coming to the lab this summer. Ashlyn, a first year Kinesiology major, joins us to do some work on Phage Detection - with the challenging task of filling the shoes of Alejandra. As usual, check out her bio on the updated “Team” page.
Today I get to feature Yaser Al Moayad, another student joining us for a studentship this summer. Supported by a Farncombe Summer Studentship, he’ll be working for 12 weeks on bacterial memory, hunting for a very specific pattern in some reporter gene assays. And I remember him telling me he was fond of making ‘interesting patterns’ while mowing lawns. For more info, check out his bio on the newly updated “Team” page.
Introducing the first of our 3 summer students: Maryam Othman. She’s secured a prestiguous NSERC USRA for the summer, and will be working with us for 14 weeks starting in May on prophages as antibiotic “sensitizing” factors. Want to ‘meet’ her? Check out her bio in our updated “Team” page.
Yeah, that was actually my title - a talk given today by this not-particularly illustrious “a” at the Canadian Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium Symposium (see here). What do I know about Cancer? Not much - I’ll not pretend otherwise. But as more and more compounds of interest to cancer researchers show up in our screens, this gave me the drive to brush up. Cross-field engagement like this is fun, how you build unexpected collaborations, and a really good way to put into practice all that talk about how to craft an engaging narrative.
Yup, this one is just boasting about myself. On Sunday, I ran my first ever race - finally putting my pandemic running to the test. This was the Hamilton Classic, Historic “Around the Bay”, whose claim to fame (among others) is being older than the Boston Marathon. I told my students - entirely honestly - that I had about a 20% chance of hitting my goal (2 h 15 min)… and somehow flew through the race, ending in 2 h 7 min 50s. I underestimated myself, the energy from the race. I also had a blast, and will be doing this again next year… and the year after that…
More Spring News, for the Fall - this time for Autumn. She just let me know that she accepted an offer to pursue an MSc with Dr. Kirsten Bell, in Kinesiology, this Fall - exciting! And when I asked for a celebratory picture, she, too, volunteered the same headshot she submitted a year ago. I thought this was supposed to be the age of selfies and constantly updated photos? Pretty soon, this website will have as many out-of-date pictures as your average University Department’s website.
I knew the celebrations would start to come in fast in March - today Jacob shared with us the news that he’d been accepted into the MBioTech program at UofT… which starts in May (!). This is great news for Jacob, although when asked for a celebratory picture, he failed to provide one, so I am yet again re-using an old picture, but imagining his hands thrown up in elation.
February is often a quiet, productive month - but we’ve entered the madness of March! Students find out about scholarships, I’ll find out about a grant, students find out about grad school/med school interviews… I am sure the lull in lab website news is over.
Kicking it all off, in fact, is this week’s wonderful new that Alan obtained a CSM Undergraduate Award! This is a national recognition of an exceptional undergrad, and a very deserved win! He’ll get to receive the certificate in person at the Banquet in June, but for now, here is the picture he sent me of his celebration. Which… is just the picture he sent me last year for the lab website. sigh
Amany’s exceptional work on temperate phage-antibiotic synergy (tPAS) just got its second (and even cooler) chapter - as part of submitting the manuscript, we posted a preprint on ResearchSquare. Check it out here!
And now, with Rabia passing her Candidacy, I am left with no PhD Students… just PhD Candidates. Superb job - I was particularly impressed with her answer on how she would track lysogeny over time in transposable phages, which showed some ingenuity and quick thinking on her feet!
It was overdue, and it was wonderful. We had everyone in the lab yesterday scrubbing, mopping, cleaning, doing maintenance, etc. The result speaks for itself - in the short term, it is great. In the long term, it is essential to keeping things running smoothly.
Yes, the forced alliterations are back - you know you love them! Today, Tamina was awarded a Dean’s Award for Oustanding Leadership & Contributions to the International Graduate Student Community. This is a recognition of her wonderful work outside the lab, so I am not here to take credit for it, but just showcase how great our team is!
The first of several attempts to secure masks & RATs have born fruit, with more on the way - but critically, most of us are 2 weeks post booster. I now get to lift some restrictions, and have a few of us back in the lab.
I have, once again, shut down the lab. This time, not to spare us COVID (I think that ship has sailed, given the failure of provincial leadership), but to at least ensure that everyone is boosted by the time they encounter covid, and to help preserve hospital capacity. I have also purchased N95s and RATs for our return. We will check back in two weeks -stay safe out there.
And its back - the in person Christmas party, the in-person Secret Santa! Things aren’t quite back to normal - as you can see from the masks, but we were able to put together something pretty close to our party from 2019, aka ‘back in the day’. I was absolutely shocked at how good people were at guessing their secret Santa - over half got it on their first try. I wasn’t one of them :P.
Over the last two days, Amany & Alejandra have been representing the lab at Phage Futures 2021, which they were sponsored to attend by Cytophage. I was really debating whether to highlight this with a picture of the city, of fries, beer, chocolate, or a picture of the poster session. So… I decided on a little of everything. Click through for the poster session.
I’ve hosted a podcast… but it’s been a long time since I was on the guest side of things! MURSA interviewed me just a few days ago about my career, , phages, and advice for undergraduates. The podcast is up here: https://spoti.fi/3CvhEC7
A huge shout out to Janice, who took home the prize for best MSc poster at the IIDR last week. Given she won for best undergraduate poster a few years back (perhaps the only person so far to claim those two titles?) - and for a completely different project - it’s clear Janice has serious scicomm chops!
There will come a day where I stop using alliterative titles… but that is not this day. Today, we celebrate the publication of an article, a collaboration with Bienenstock lab, that just appeared in Gut Microbes. The coolest tidbit in here was the fact that the prophages in the probiotic strain were detectable as free phages systemically in mice a mere 30 minutes after administration of the probiotic! Check out the open access article for more here.
A fantastic “lab feature” in our BBS talk on Tuesday - for which Gayatri, Amany and Rabia all deserve serious congratulations - a best-ever performance by Tamina in presenting her research at RIP on Wednesday, and a lab outing to see Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune today… it’s been a busy week!
