June 1, 2010

June already, eh? Sigh. Definitely time for an update.

People:
I had two high school students in the lab for a few months, a couple days a week after school, as part of a Sanofi Bioaventis Challenge. They had hoped to solve the problem of early diagnosis in prion disease in their time here, but I had to convince them that that was a bit out of reach for their short project. Instead we looked at toxicity of prion peptides on cell culture. At least, that was the plan… At least they learned a bunch of techniques and in the process we got Western blotting working in my lab.

I also have a great summer student. It appears that in order to work in my lab, at least so far, your name must begin with J… So J and J are busily getting things done. Now if only I could find a good post-doc candidate. That is proving to be harder than I thought…

Experiments:
We have lots of slice cultures growing, and are trying to infect them now. The first 5 week infection experiment didn’t work, and we found out that a certain someone who gave us the infected source sample gave us one without any infectivity in it! You know who you are… Anyway, we now trust no one and have confirmed there is abnormal prion protein in the latest batch so hopefully we’ll have some infected slices after 5 weeks or so. Our own mice are on site now too, so that helps a lot. Now we are playing around with gene gunning our slices (yes, we shoot DNA or dye-coated beads at our slices!).

Grants:
My biggest news is that I got my Alberta Heritage Grant! It was a bit of a long shot, but I am really happy. That guarantees I have salary support for 7 years, and gives me some operating funds for 3 years. I didn’t get the PrioNet recruitment grant despite all that work, primarily because it overlapped too much with the Heritage Grant. Go figure. I am learning that navigating the nuances of different granting agencies is not as straightforward as I thought. Oh, and my other grant in the works is the infrastructure CFI grant. That was supposed to be reviewed in April and announced in May, but they had so many applications that the put off reviewing some of them (mine included) until June! So I am still waiting to hear about that so I can buy some of my more expensive pieces of equipment… We also didn’t get the NSERC grant we wanted as a Centre, but have just resubmitted, so we’ll see if we have more luck this time. My next big grant will be the dreaded CIHR grant next spring…

Travel:
I went to the American Academy of Neurology meeting in Toronto – the first time since I was a resident. It is more enjoyable when you don’t have an exam looming over you.

Other:
I wound up leading a Meet-a-Mentor initiative at the University, as part of WISEST. We did 4 teleconferences to rural junior high schools over lunch hours, doing some science and engineering labs with them. From jelly beans to volcanoes to turkey basters, it was a lot of fun (and work!). All in the name of inspiring kids to go into science or engineering…

One last tidbit – that WISEST talk I gave last summer? Well, the students enjoyed it so invited me to be their keynote speaker at their graduation last week. It was quite an experience – and a flashback to high school band renditions of Pomp and Circumstance. Anyway, my two take-home messages were “Be happy” and “Follow your passions”. I hope I can live up to that too…