Setting up a molecular biology lab is never easy. Luckily, there’s no scarcity of help from colleagues and staff members working in other labs. Things are even smoother when there is a stock room down the street. This morning I bought a few basic items from the Biochemistry stock room, mainly to ‘test the system’ and check out what’s stocked and available right away. Yes, there is no actual reagent yet except agarose, hidden somewhere in the pic; hey, Rome hasn’t been built in a day, has it?!
Archives for July 2014
The EEB Workshop on Open Source Software was a success!
The Ecology & Evolutionary program is a fantastic interdisciplinary group at A&M that will officially kick-off as a graduate program very soon (link).
This summer the EEB program offered for the first time the ‘Open Source for Open Science’ workshop, a free summer workshop featuring an introduction to R, *nix commands, and open source GIS (link). The workshop was a success, with more than 80 (!) participants. I taught the *nix (Unix-based systems, such as Linux) commands session, which was a great teaching experience and an excellent way to expand my *nix commands toolkit. Special thanks to Rebecca Clark, postdoc in Spencer Behmer lab, and to my wife Michelle Lawing, also an ESSM faculty (link), for organizing this workshop!
Presentation in Austin
Updating lab events can be quite slow.. Last May 16th I gave a talk on Gene Conversion in Eukaryotes at the 2nd Annual Symposium on Big Data in Biology (BDiB) in Austin.
Hans Hofman, director of the UT Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, his student Ryana Harris and other folks at UT did a great job in organizing this one day-long, very lively meeting. Lots of great talks and posters. I surely hope to attend next year BDiB!