Life at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
In January, my thesis adviser asked me if I wanted to attend the Annual European Congress of Rheumatology meeting in Amsterdam, which is scheduled for this June. To date, this is the easiest question my adviser has ever asked me, and my answer was a resounding “yes.” In most ways, a scientific conference is basically […]
I occasionally find myself walking through the dark underbelly of the Johns Hopkins medical campus along “designated laboratory transport” routes. These concrete tunnels allow researchers to transport equipment or mice from animal facilities to laboratories without passing through patient areas. I always feel a pang of sadness when I see stacks of dog food in […]
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…the Science & Entertainment Exchange? Ann Merchant swooped into the February Telling Stories About Science seminar with an origin story in hand and prepared to engage. The goal of this seminar program is to invite professionals with a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise to give monthly seminars on […]
If you were diagnosed with a disease, there are two questions you would immediately want answered: 1. How can we treat it? 2. What caused the disease? Those two questions are the foundation of my Ph.D. thesis. I study a muscle disease called inclusion body myositis (IBM), which is sometimes referred to as the “Alzheimer’s […]
The holidays can be a trying time for graduate students. We are frequently bombarded with two questions: “When will you graduate?” and “What will you do when you’re done?” The first question is a sort of moving target — Ph.D. programs do not have a specified length or graduation time — and the second is […]
“You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” -Sarah Palin As a graduate student in a lab […]
More often than not, people come to a point in their academic careers where they hit a wall; some of us just do it more literally than others. What started out as a strange niche sport for people living on the fringe of society has quickly become a fast-growing sport in America. The first indoor […]