To all IBH students and faculty members:
With great pride, I'd [Chris Cheng] like to congratulate the graduating IBH seniors who have done excellent independent research and received Distinctions and High Distinctions from SIB for their research effort and paper. Six of the 16 in the cohort received this SIB honor, and two others who double major in Chemistry will be receiving distinction in Chemistry. In other words, half of the IBH class of 2016 is graduating with Distinction! SIB Distinction recipients are: Feng Zhu: Distinction. Research - "Electrophysiological and Mass spectrometric investigation of Aplysia Californica L7 neurons". (Feng graduated last December, one semester ahead of the usual 4 year program). Nathan Stables: HIGH Distinction and the Long Award! Research - "The Effect of Garden Plant Diversity of Mosquito Species that Act as Infectious Disease Vectors in Central Illinois." Neil Wagner: HIGH Distinction Research - "Constructing a Single-Color Fluorescent Indicator Protein for Monitoring CaM-Ca2+ Binding." Megan McKeon: Distinction Research - "Phylogenetic and Genomics Study of the Pineapple Cysteine Protease Family Bromelain." Finey Ruan: HIGH Distinction Research - "Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) Analysis of the Genes Controlling the Size of the Seed head (Panicle) under Wet versus Dry Conditions in the Model C4 Grass, Setaria." Sally Ladsaria: HIGH Distinction Research - "Pituitary Progenitor Cultures as a Tool to Define the Mechanism of Notch Mediated Cell-Fate Choice." We celebrate your achievements! You have done the IBH Program tremendously proud!
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See the newest cool stuff from the awesome "octo-duo" IBH juniors (class of 2017) Alex Duman and Andrew Tran!
They wrote a pop science article "The Octopus Project: Raising Octopus bimaculoides Hatchlings in Captivity" to share their octopus raising techniques and FishChannel.Com published it! Congratulations! Check it out here. Andrew Tran, IBH class of 2017, is first author on a scientific review paper, "The Role of Coffee in the Therapy of Parkinson's Disease" that was published on Jan. 5, 2016 in J. Alzheimers Disease & Parkinsonism. Read all about it at http://www.omicsonline.org/…/the-role-of-coffee-in-the-ther….
What a great way to start a new year! Drink more coffee! Congratulations to Andrew Tran (above) for his design winning a majority support by the IBH students, faculty and alumni! Honorable mentions include the runners up Matt Boyce (lower right) and Alex Duman (lower left).
On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful for all the IBH students past and present - studious, laissez faire, iconoclastic, prudent, comical, reserved, zany, pensive, artistic, analytical...all very cool and dedicated, who give life and meaning to the IBH program and the success it is. Wherever you are, with family or friends, I wish you all a wonderful day!
A big congratulation also to two of our current seniors, Melissa Foster and Feng Zhu, who have been invited to join Phi Beta Kappa (http://www.pbk.illinois.edu/), the oldest and most prestigious honor society for the liberal arts and sciences, for their excellent scholastic achievements. Alex and Andrew, IBH class of 2017 , are currently juniors. The inseparable "dyno-duo" kids who are crazy about raising octopi and studying sea slugs. They are co-first authors on a poster presentation on their research yesterday at the gargantuous Neuroscience 2015 meeting in Chicago.
Early yesterday morning they boarded a train for Chicago to attend the conference at McCormick Place. With 30,000 plus attendees, this is the largest conference dedicated to neuroscience in the world. They presented their poster “Computation Mechanisms in the Peripheral Nervous System of the Predatory Sea Slug Pleurobranchaea.” Their research centers on the effects of key neurotransmitters and their antagonists in behavioral and electrophysiological paradigms. The boys said the presentation was a great experience to get off campus and showcase their research to other researchers, professors, and other students in a professional conference. Their travel was funded by the generous Travel Grants from the Office of Undergraduate Research. Check out these awesome pics! Hi! My name is Finey and I’m a senior right now in IBH. Last year, I went abroad to Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom on the only pre-med study abroad program here on campus. This program advertises for MCB majors, so I was an exception in the history of the program. My survival proves that this is possible, and I encourage any IBH pre-med students to try it out. This academic year-long program is for juniors, so you would apply the fall semester of your sophomore year (look now if you’re interested!). If 2 semesters is too long, other study abroad programs would be another wonderful option. To keep things short, I took classes in Newcastle’s medical school, interned at the Royal Victoria Infirmary shadowing a surgeon, traveled the UK, took horse riding lessons, and backpacked across Europe for a month. It was an awesome year that I don’t regret. To top it off, all of my expenses (other than traveling because that was on me) was covered! Contact me if you’d like to find out how that was possible, but it’s definitely possible.
As for my commitments on campus, I was able to delay them for a year and pick them right back up. I am a James Scholar, double majoring in Chemistry, but I will still be graduating on time. I completed all of my advanced level credits for IBH abroad, so I only really needed to focus on Chemistry classes upon return. I joined a lab in my sophomore year, left for a year, and now, I am working towards a thesis for graduation distinctions in the same lab. If lab commitment is a major issue, the professor will be more than happy to have you back in the lab, granted that you don’t break equipment worth thousands of dollars. For old James Scholar requirements, I was able to double up on my honors credit by taking the last IBH required ecology class as well as interning for LAS 122. If you opted into the new requirements, study abroad earns you enrichment points!! Also, employers on campus are more than likely going to hire you back if you were awesome at your job. I had a federal work study job since freshman year and I got re-hired again upon return even though I lost my federal work study because I was out of the US for 2 semesters (1 semester should be fine). My life may seem very hectic right now, but I still found time every week to enjoy playing billiards or binge on anime and new season episodes. If you’re interested in study abroad or on anything that I do, feel free to contact me. It might take a while for me to respond, but I’ll try my best. ]Shannon Miller, IBH class of 2016, is a co-author of a scientific paper published in Nature Chemistry!
The study "A manganese catalyst for highly reactive yet chemoselective intramolecular C(sp3)–H amination" is published online ahead of the print version (http://www.nature.com/…/…/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.2366.html). Shannon is an aficionado of chemistry. She has been doing research in Professor Christina White's lab since her sophomore year. She helped with develop a system of manganese and iron phthalocyanine catalysts, with a focus on their utility in the synthesis and derivitization of drugs and natural product molecules. IBH students are so multi-talented! Please join me in giving Shannon a hand of applause. Hey everyone,
Thought I’d follow up to Brendan's great first post. I’m Matt and I graduated IBH in 2012. I worked in Alison Bell’s group on the antipredator benefits of schooling. After graduating, I spent a year working with Niels Dingemanse at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology on a Fulbright grant, studying social foraging and sleep in great tits. I’m now in my third year of a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton with Iain Couzin. Alison and Niels are well-known in the field of animal personality, or consistent individual differences in behavior. Some animals are consistently more aggressive than their conspecifics, for example, when it’s beneficial but also when it’s not. The entire field is based on individual differences, so it was quite a surprise to read big papers from collective behavior (what I study now) and to see every paper treat all group members as identical. It’s mathematically convenient and has allowed us to develop key insights (e.g. you can get sophisticated group behavior without any sort of central control, just individuals following simple rules), but this assumption of homogeneity is pretty biologically unrealistic. I’m trying to see what role heterogeneity plays in a collective behavior with crucial ties to fitness: coordinated antipredator behavior. When predators attack some species of fish, waves of escape response move through the group so fast that it’s really hard for a predator to catch anyone. I’m curious how variation in perception of risk affects how these waves propagate. Some fish, for example, will perceive the environment as much riskier than others due to inherent skittishness or previous experience with predators. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of consensus emerges from this variation, whether the group just averages every individual’s perception, whether skittish individuals hold disproportionate influence, etc. No BBC program to catch here, unfortunately. tongue emoticon I do have a blog that I semi-regularly post in called The Headbanging Behaviorist:mattgrobis.blogspot.com. It has academia advice, summaries of articles, and posts about metal music I like. I figured I’d put it all in one blog in case the occasional metalhead stumbles into a science post and finds something interesting, as opposed to never Googling it in the first place. I have a few posts with advice for college students in the Academia Advice section if anyone’s interested. IBH was excellent preparation for grad school but a PhD is still pretty hard. My advisor left Princeton a few months ago to become the director of a Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (go figure!), so everyone in the lab has had to be a lot more independent than we’d anticipated. I'll likely move to Germany in a year or so once a big chunk of the lab graduates. In the meantime, we've been doing things pretty much on our own here. While it’s hard to make mistakes and not know what you’re doing, pushing through it is a vital learning experience for becoming self-sufficient. No one in grad school will tell you to do something (unless you have a really hands-on advisor); it’s up to you to justify why you’re studying what you are, and you have to understand it deeply enough to eventually be able to convince others that it’s important and interesting, too. The benefits are that you’re being paid to learn all day, you often have huge flexibility in your work schedule, and you’re likely to be surrounded by really smart and interesting people. If you’re considering doing a PhD in animal behavior or ecology, I strongly suggest taking as much statistics and coding as you can fit into your schedule. Like it or not, you’ll end up taking them eventually, and it’ll be easier if you’ve already gone through it once. Learn as much as you can of an open-source language like R or Python; skip SASS, SPSS, or MATLAB, all which require paid licenses. A colleague of mine who uses MATLAB just finished her PhD and was actually having a hard time finding data science jobs in industry because companies didn’t want to pay the annual MATLAB fees. It’s ok if you don’t understand the stats or coding the first time; believe me, you’ll try again and again in grad school until you get it. :) Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions. -Matt Hey everyone,
I graduated in the IBH class of 2013. Chris contacted me about the IBH Student Highlight section and I think this is a great networking opportunity within the student body. I'm starting my third year at Harvard's Systems Biology Department studying synthetic biology in Pam Silver's lab and work mainly on artificial photosynthesis and electrobiology. Photosynthesis has a lot of limitations and I combine the unique advantages of inorganic chemistry and microbiology to achieve difficult solar-to-chemical transformations in a device we call the 'bionic leaf'. In short, I design bio-compatible water-splitting catalysts that break water into H2 and O2 from sunlight and interface these with bacteria capable of using H2 and CO2 as its sole source of energy and carbon respectively. These bacteria are also engineered to produce biofuels and plastics. Interestingly, this technology has a 10% solar-to-biomass conversion efficiency, exceeding the majority of natural photosynthetic systems (1% for terrestrial plants, 5-7% for microalgae) and is the most efficient bioeletrochemical fuel producer reported by over 90-fold. The bionic leaf will also air on BBC Horizon November 28th for the show's anniversary so be sure to check out my awkward demonstration of how the technology works. I'm currently looking into consulting jobs for boutique firms that specialize in environmental or energy issues. While it means dressing up for work, I've actually found the problem solving aspect to be a very fun and creative process given the problem is worth solving. IBH's incentives to do research are strong and rightfully so. I did research in the Schuler and Berenbaum labs for 3 years and that gave me the experience necessary to join a big lab in grad school that has many freedoms and resources but little oversight/mentoring. Maybe this is mostly because I joined a systems biology department but the quantitative background I (barely) achieved was very valuable and got me through a few very rigorous interviews. If I could have done anything differently I would have tried to use Python (which I have a strong bias to using, feel free to disagree) in undergrad because good bioinformatics, if done properly, can put bench work into 'easy mode'. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask, I know a glossed over a lot of details. Cheers, BC |
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November 2016
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