Happy 2025!

We’ve turned the page on 2025, and just had the Lunar New Year. As a potential point of interest, this is the year of the Snake, which is my own birth year. It is fun having students guess which multiple 12 of age I am, though it will probably turn depressing the next time it comes around…

The lab has been having a great run so far. We welcomed Janeel Naidu, who has been with us from the beginning, as an MSc student. He will be working on studying the kinetics of DNA repair in living cells. Our undergraduate roster remains very strong, with superstars Hilary, Jenny, Melika, Sairah, and Ramtin starting up as volunteers or directed research students. OG grad student Kyle has been taking a leadership role in mentoring the undergrads, which is a huge help! We are expecting to build up to what I hope to be the steady state of this phase of my career this year (~5 full-time members).

The lab itself is essentially up and running at full speed. We’ve performed our first long-read sequencing experiment—whether it worked is a different story—and have been hard at work cultivating collaborations using our AlphaFold PPI screen pipeline. Our protein purification pipeline is fully up and running now, and I have dragged Jenny and Janeel through the long purification days that is a rite of passage for many biochemists. A lot of exciting projects are on the upswing now, and now I see why my previous supervisor Dan loved seeing data as they come; it’s like an IV drip of euphoria...

We’ve also had the tremendous fortune to be funded for our first CIHR Project Grant. Stay tuned for the exciting science that comes out of this generous funding source!