I had to look it up, but yes, alliteration is by sound, not by letter. I think I knew this at some point. Ok, enough of about the title - more about the picture; at this year’s IIDR Trainee Day, Jordan got to present his MSc work for the first time - and his poster was so busy, I never got a chance to chat with him about how it was going until the next day!

See the picture? We’re famous! I don’t think we’ve featured on the McMaster front news yet… but here we are (see link here). We’ve regularly trained graduate students from other labs to give them the tools they need to work with phages, but this was a first time for an undergrad, and that apparently caught someone’s eye!

This one, you have to click through to see the pictures… there’s too much to capture in one thumbnail. But the Thumbnail is great too - that look of intense concentration in pumpkin carving, and the payoff… well, you’ll have to click through, now, won’t you!

This year, with a great song/entrance routine, we managed to take the best possible place in the costume contest (2nd. Nobody can dethrone the Li lab, apparently!), and some good strategic planning won us first place in the Pumpkin Carving Contest.

Well, it’s not really Tamina’s, but she had an electron microscopy run today, and a few other lab members tagged along to learn the tricks of the trade… which means we now have photographic evidence. I love the ‘antique’ displays in the foreground… really adds to the ambience.

You know, we often celebrate a new piece of equipment… but the unsung hero of the lab is storage space. With some recent changes in the lab layout, we’ve made room for this fancy new rack, and it has been a game-changer. Am I excited about storage solutions? Yes. Does that make me weird? Probably.

Also, if OHS is reading, that cardboard box is exactly 45 cm from the ceiling.

Ok, despite the same letter, I realize this title wasn’t alliterative… but this isn’t just a phage publication - it’s a publication in the jouranl PHAGE. You can check it out here. This one had an unusual route, with Amany taking lead to support an effort based elsewhere - making it the only case where one of my students is lead author, but I’m not corresponding!

It’s our first forray into systematic reviews for phage therapy, but one of the nice findings to come out of it for me was not just the core findings, but the pattern of publications in this field - a huge gap in the 90s and 00s that tracks with a wide-scale lack of interest (and training) in phages. I’ll definitely be using that figure!

While Amany has abandoned us for Alberta, she made a brief trip back for her husband’s PhD defence (!), as well as making an in-person appearance to kick off the BBS seminar series. It was a treat to have her back and sharing this story that is oh-so-close to its end, as she sets off to write up.

Yes, I haven’t been updating the site much during pat leave (not much longer, now, though) - but I couldn’t not acknowledge the crew that participated in lab cleanup, with two of three new faces pictured here. Had a bit of a different feel this year, as the lab space is no longer shared with the Stearns lab… but the end result - a clean, tidy lab space (for now) is always a treat.

While I couldn’t attend (Pat leave has some drawbacks!), I’m delighted Greg German had the idea to call on the Canadian Phage presence at Evergreen for a group shot - look at the number of labs represented!

It’s the end of the RIP year, and that means awards. And because my lab is awesome, that means Felix picked one up this year - congratulations!

We gathered in the driving park (with a few children missing, thank god for summer camps) to say goodbye to Amany, who is heading out West to finish writing up her Thesis. It feels like we just got her back from Mat leave! Oh, and if you’re eagle-eyed, you may spot in my arms why updates have been slower than usual.

The best session of the CSM, every year, is the student competition - no competing sessions, all focus on the trainees, incredibly high-quality talks that never run over time. And everyone knows it - the attendance is high, the enrollment is highly competitive - this year, 92 extended abstracts submitted for contention. It is quite an experience just to be one of the 12 selected to showcase your research in front of the entire Canadian Microbiology Community. And winning? Well that’s awesome. And both Rabia and Felix won this year. Wow. Wow. Wow.

With baby #5 due any day, I had to miss out on my favourite part of the year. Thankfully, my students are sending me updates so I can live vicariously through them - here’s Christine presenting her poster (and looking a little scared of her error bars) on Day 1.

At a BBSRS that started with the Chair’s reflections on creativity, I was fittingly impressed by the poster setup (pictured below). The CRISPR contingent (Felix and Christine) presented posters - Christine’s first, and Rabia was invited to give a talk - which was superb. The Hynes lab was very well represented! The only drawback was running home in 31 C weather after…

From a remarkable talk at the FHS plenary two weeks ago to this week’s RIP, Christine has been knocking it out of the park and getting a very wide audience to connect with her research. I assume the memes help (see pic), but any day now she’ll be deploying ones I don’t recognize at all, and I’ll feel old… or rather, older?

You’ll never guess which Marathon I just ran. There are no clues in the picture (Click through for the “after” pic). Now, I’ve heard plenty of people compare grad school to ‘a marathon, not a sprint’ - and I think with two marathons (but only one PhD) under my belt, I’m beginning to be qualified to comment on that analogy… and yeah, not a fan. The two are nothing alike!

Not just Star Wars Day (although it is that, see the shirt!) - but lab cleanup day, on the birthday of the mentor who introduced me to this tradition. Everyone scrubs, everyone pitches in, we find all the missing racks (turns out we do have a lot!), and the boss buys lunch. It’s a good day.

I think when my last student passed her compehensive, I mistakenly claimed that I had no more PhD students… having somehow forgotten poor Gayatri. Last Friday, hot off the back of winning a poster award, she became the first MedSci PhD Candidate in the lab, and did so off the back of a truly impressive exam. While it’s definitely more challenging than the “on-topic” BBS candidacy, I think it’s a far better format for testing the core skills needed for a PhD - and Gayatri showed she has those in spades. Well done!

Stealing my keynote-lecture Thunder, Gayatri took a break from studying for her comps later this week to show up, present, and walk away with a prize for best poster. What a flex!

Today at the MedSci research day - the first since the pandemic, I was invited to give a keynote touching on themes of work-life balance. It’s my first in-person talk not about my science since… well… since back in the teaching Salsa days. It was a real treat to have such a large, rapt, and engaged audience, although the irony of a talk on work-life-balance finished at 11:45 the night before isn’t lost on me. Also, it wasn’t even the biggest lab event of the day… more on that later.