Fall Travel
09 November 2009
The last few months have been exciting. We published
a paper describing next-generation sequencing to
understand macaque genetics in Nature Medicine this
week. Though it is probably of interest only to
afficianados, it did prompt UW-Madison and Roche to
issue press releases.
Congratulations to Roger and the rest of our
genetics team!
There has been quite a lot of travel in the last few months. Shelby attended the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology meeting at Duke. She gave a talk on her ECI research project and met other CHAVI investigators.
Justin Greene, Ben Burwitz, and I flew to Paris for the AIDS Vaccine 2009 meeting three weeks ago. Justin and Ben both presented posters on their recent research. The following week, Shelby, Roger, Julie, Ben Bimber, and I went to Boston for the annual NHP AIDS symposium. Ben, Shelby, and Julie gave talks on their research, while Roger presented a poster. I sat on the sidelines like a lazy bum! That's not entirely true, as I had to give two presentations at a small pre-meeting.
The Boston meeting is not the end of our fall travel. Shelby and I will be going to the Human Vaccine Trials Network meeting in Seattle in mid-November. From there, we will be flying to Sao Paulo to visit our collaborator Dr. Kallas. I'll be home for about six weeks before venturing to Uganda with my clinical colleague Jim Sosman and research collaborator Tom Friedrich. While there, we will visit with the Rakai Health Sciences Program, see our friend Denis Nansera, and hopefully spend a little time in primate parks.
In non-travel related news, we are welcoming three rotating graduate students into our lab this semester. We are excited to meet with new students and share our lab with new students. Two rotations are complete and a third started this week. The semester is flying by.
We are also furiously writing papers. Shelby and Justin have papers under submission currently, while Julie and Ben Burwitz are writing papers that should be submitted by the end of the year. An exciting time in lab, but also one that is very busy.
There has been quite a lot of travel in the last few months. Shelby attended the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology meeting at Duke. She gave a talk on her ECI research project and met other CHAVI investigators.
Justin Greene, Ben Burwitz, and I flew to Paris for the AIDS Vaccine 2009 meeting three weeks ago. Justin and Ben both presented posters on their recent research. The following week, Shelby, Roger, Julie, Ben Bimber, and I went to Boston for the annual NHP AIDS symposium. Ben, Shelby, and Julie gave talks on their research, while Roger presented a poster. I sat on the sidelines like a lazy bum! That's not entirely true, as I had to give two presentations at a small pre-meeting.
The Boston meeting is not the end of our fall travel. Shelby and I will be going to the Human Vaccine Trials Network meeting in Seattle in mid-November. From there, we will be flying to Sao Paulo to visit our collaborator Dr. Kallas. I'll be home for about six weeks before venturing to Uganda with my clinical colleague Jim Sosman and research collaborator Tom Friedrich. While there, we will visit with the Rakai Health Sciences Program, see our friend Denis Nansera, and hopefully spend a little time in primate parks.
In non-travel related news, we are welcoming three rotating graduate students into our lab this semester. We are excited to meet with new students and share our lab with new students. Two rotations are complete and a third started this week. The semester is flying by.
We are also furiously writing papers. Shelby and Justin have papers under submission currently, while Julie and Ben Burwitz are writing papers that should be submitted by the end of the year. An exciting time in lab, but also one that is very busy.
It Starts Anew
26 August 2009
So...here we are again. The end of summer is nearly
upon us; I inadvertently drove into undergrad move-in
preparations yesterday and realized that fall and
winter are on the way. Undergrad move-in is a good
time to shake the cobwebs off the website and give
some updates on our lab. Gosh, where to begin...
First, if you are a graduate student interested in a rotation, please read by graduate student training philosophy and review my research program.
Last month we said goodbye to Claire O’Leary who left our lab to start grad school at the University of Pennsylvania. Ann Detmer left to become an Assistant Track coach at Cal (I imagine it is easy to be a track coach when your runners are motivated by a hungry Golden Bear). Kevin Campbell, a four year undergraduate in the lab, also left to start medical school at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The new faces from earlier this summer are already well integrated in the lab. All four undergraduates supported by ARRA money presented lab meetings on their projects and I have high hopes that most of this work will eventually be published. Claire’s work has already been submitted for publication.
Speaking of publications....we are still anxiously awaiting publication of a high profile manuscript in a journal-that-shall-remain-nameless-because-of-a-manuscript-embargo. In papers that I can talk about, Julie Karl published an MHC techniques paper in the creatively named journal ‘Methods’. Ben Bimber’s paper in collaboration with Ha Youn Lee from the University of Rochester was published in ‘Retrovirology’. In addition to the aforementioned papers in press and under submission, I expect Shelby and Justin to each submit a paper within the next few weeks, with more papers following soon thereafter from Ben Burwitz and Melisa Budde.
We’ve had a fairly relaxing summer in terms of presentations. Dawn Dudley presented her work in South Africa at the 5th IAS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment, and Prevention and then traveled to Uganda to meet with potential collaborators in Uganda. But I stayed home this summer - I think this is my first summer without business travel in more than five years! Perhaps this reclusive behavior isn’t by choice? After all, I did give a Neil Diamond themed presentation at Harvard University in April. The acknowledgements video (with help from our friends in the AIDS Vaccine Research Lab) pretty much says it all.
Let’s see...what else...we are very happy to report that an NIH R01 grant that I co-authored with Dr. Tom Friedrich scored very well and may be funded. If the grant is funded, we will explore the importance of broadly directed cellular immune responses in an animal model of HIV/AIDS. In addition, we received a favorable score for a renewal of an NIH R24 application to improve our understanding of macaque genetics. I also contributed to several ARRA applications that received promising evaluations. I think that now I am genuinely done writing grants for a while*.
*(at least 2 weeks)
Lastly, thanks to the miracle of Google Analytics, I still track who comes to visit my lab’s web page. A big thanks to Jen Lhost’s secret admirer, whose google search represents a whopping 12.28% of all traffic to the site in the last month. Also, like Styx, we’re (relatively) huge in Asia.
First, if you are a graduate student interested in a rotation, please read by graduate student training philosophy and review my research program.
Last month we said goodbye to Claire O’Leary who left our lab to start grad school at the University of Pennsylvania. Ann Detmer left to become an Assistant Track coach at Cal (I imagine it is easy to be a track coach when your runners are motivated by a hungry Golden Bear). Kevin Campbell, a four year undergraduate in the lab, also left to start medical school at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The new faces from earlier this summer are already well integrated in the lab. All four undergraduates supported by ARRA money presented lab meetings on their projects and I have high hopes that most of this work will eventually be published. Claire’s work has already been submitted for publication.
Speaking of publications....we are still anxiously awaiting publication of a high profile manuscript in a journal-that-shall-remain-nameless-because-of-a-manuscript-embargo. In papers that I can talk about, Julie Karl published an MHC techniques paper in the creatively named journal ‘Methods’. Ben Bimber’s paper in collaboration with Ha Youn Lee from the University of Rochester was published in ‘Retrovirology’. In addition to the aforementioned papers in press and under submission, I expect Shelby and Justin to each submit a paper within the next few weeks, with more papers following soon thereafter from Ben Burwitz and Melisa Budde.
We’ve had a fairly relaxing summer in terms of presentations. Dawn Dudley presented her work in South Africa at the 5th IAS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment, and Prevention and then traveled to Uganda to meet with potential collaborators in Uganda. But I stayed home this summer - I think this is my first summer without business travel in more than five years! Perhaps this reclusive behavior isn’t by choice? After all, I did give a Neil Diamond themed presentation at Harvard University in April. The acknowledgements video (with help from our friends in the AIDS Vaccine Research Lab) pretty much says it all.
Let’s see...what else...we are very happy to report that an NIH R01 grant that I co-authored with Dr. Tom Friedrich scored very well and may be funded. If the grant is funded, we will explore the importance of broadly directed cellular immune responses in an animal model of HIV/AIDS. In addition, we received a favorable score for a renewal of an NIH R24 application to improve our understanding of macaque genetics. I also contributed to several ARRA applications that received promising evaluations. I think that now I am genuinely done writing grants for a while*.
*(at least 2 weeks)
Lastly, thanks to the miracle of Google Analytics, I still track who comes to visit my lab’s web page. A big thanks to Jen Lhost’s secret admirer, whose google search represents a whopping 12.28% of all traffic to the site in the last month. Also, like Styx, we’re (relatively) huge in Asia.