Dr. Lawrence Tabak Takes a Shot with UR Biomedical Trainees

News Article By Claire McCarthy, PhD candidate, and Julianne Feola, PhD candidate

As part of his visit to the University of Rochester on April 15^th, 2016, Dr. Lawrence Tabak’s only request was that he would get to meet with students and post-docs to have a discussion about the ethical issues surrounding biomedical research. As the Deputy Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he particularly enjoys hearing the perspective of trainees in the field. He was granted his wish with an hour-long Q&A session prior to his talk, “The Reproducibility of Biomedical Research.”  His Q&A session and talk were both well attended by scientists at all stages. According to Dr. Tabak, current issues of biomedical research have been garnering widespread interest among the scientific community as well as the general population.

My Path Wasn’t Linear: The Story of a Reluctant Educator

Career Story Blog Post By Jenny Hadingham, PhD, Assistant Director & Lecturer, Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (CETL) at University of Rochester

This blog post is all about how I ended up in Faculty Development. As I reflect on my pathway to this point, I am amused at just how non-linear it has been. In fact, if you had told me 20 years ago that I would be teaching big, scary professors how to improve their teaching, I’m pretty certain that I would have gone into voluntary exile in Siberia. Naked. My natural shyness and introversion would have made sure of that!

Research bench to clinical bench: Two sides of the same coin

Career Story Blog Post By Lauren Brooks, PhD, Medical Technologist (ASCP) Trainee Rochester General Hospital/University of Rochester Medical Center

So you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up? You love bench science but the life of a PI doesn’t appeal? Look to the other side of the bench science world: Clinical Laboratory Science. 

Developing the Skills to Pay the Bills

Career Story Blog Post By Benson Cheng, PhD, Investment Analyst at Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS)

Whether you are a PhD student or post doc, you know that the journey to a faculty position can be long and arduous. This can be due to a 24/7 schedule, constant nagging from PI’s to publish, or that overwhelming feeling where you don’t know how to interpret data because you are “literally the first person in human history to make this observation.” However, many factors in the past decade have made the elusive tenured-track position evermore difficult to attain, if not impossible. Now, you likely suffer from a major case of imposter syndrome and you don’t know what to do with a PhD. REAL TALK. 

Diving into Data Science

News Article By Emily Weber

            Data Science is quickly emerging as a new field that many scientists at the University of Rochester are working in and exploring. Dr. Aslihan Petenkaya, a postdoctoral fellow in the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Department, is a current fellow for the seven-week intensive post-doctoral Insight Data Science Fellows Program. She found herself interested in data science towards the end of her PhD in Hucky Land’s laboratory, where she started studying if different metabolic characteristics of cancer cells could predict how they responded to certain enzymatic inhibitors. “Predicting if a cancer cells falls into a certain class requires application of supervised learning algorithms,” said Dr. Petenkaya. “I started studying different algorithms and learned more about how data science shapes and directs our lives in very visible ways and how widely applicable the tools used in data science are.”

            Dr. Petenkaya learned about the Insight Data Science Fellow Program from a friend and filled out the online application. The Insight Data Program strives to train PhDs from academia in data science technology and partners with such companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, NBC and Spotify