So, what’s new, you ask
iGEM
Those are some Hunter iGEM team members with Sung Won Lim, one of our mentors, over at Genspace, a community lab I’m a member of. Everybody’s favorite bacterial computing project is getting off the ground. We’ve received a dozen student applications and expect a few more. Our team is absolutely wonderful, with a great diversity in experience and background. We have several amazing advisors with backgrounds in evolutionary, molecular, cell, and systems biology, molecular modeling, and synthetic biology. We’re still looking for sponsors, but are off to a good start in terms of funding with backing from Hunter College and NIH via the QuBi program, (potentially) University of Pittsburgh, and (potentially) NYU.
Employment
So excited about my new research position! Through September, my job title (full time over the summer) will be “Health Sciences Fellow in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh”. I’ll be blending some of what I do on the job with my iGEM project, as part of our goal is to build software related to synthetic biology and there is some overlap with molecular modeling. Primarily I’ll be working on the next generation version of RuleBender rule-based molecular modeling software. Molecular modeling is important in biology for understanding the inner workings of complex systems and devleoping drugs and therapies for things like cancer. Technically I’m still a research assistant in the Treespace group at Lehman, but haven’t had much to work on since I joined. I’m hoping I can work out a joint project between Lehman and Dr. Qiu’s lab at Hunter.
Hackery
A bunch of us Hack Manhattan members had a blast hosting a booth at Westport Mini Maker Faire this past weekend. We had EEG brain pong, which a mother let her baby play. We taught people the basics of opening locks without keys (while reading their brain waves!). We even had our own low cost 3D printer design up and running, with plastic “HM” keychains to give to the kids, who loved them. So many smiling people. Westport is quite a beautiful little town. We also made friends with lots of talented CT based hackers and hackerspaces. See more photos here.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Can’t wait to see what May brings. I have a few things on my wishlist…