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| The Datta Lab (plus a couple F1s), at Good Harbor Beach. |
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| Waiting for the lobster rolls. You can’t really tell, but it is COLD! |
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| New Postdoc Tatsuya. Not on TV (yet). |
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| Summer Student Max. Currently on TV. |
A happy fall (and end of summer) from the Datta lab! Lots has happened in the last 18 months (the approximate timescale upon which this blog currently operates), nearly none of which was documented, so this is an attempt to compress some of the highlights into a single blog entry. MUCH will be left unsaid – our apologies to those affected by any oversights.
First, we went to the beach (see above)! This was awesome, since the rip tides were in full effect and the waves were like something out of the movie Sharknado. We didn’t lose anyone, and those that stuck it out ended up playing mini-golf on Route 1 in Saugus in front of a plastic green dinosaur. Totally worth it.
Second, the awards roll – postdoc Giuliano Iurilli won a prestigious Human Frontiers fellowship to work in the lab on the striatum, graduate student Tari Tan netted an F31 NRSA for her work on non-canonical olfactory systems, new postdoc Tatsuya Tsukahara joined us from the University of Tokyo (where he did spectacular work in developmental molecular biology in Hiroyuki Takeda’s and Yoshi Watanabe’s labs) armed with a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science fellowship, and Bob was recently named a Vallee Foundation Young Investigator.
Third, postdoc Andrew Giessel wrote a really nice review on odor coding and circuit function different olfactory regions in the brain, linked here. Check it out!
Finally, the lab also got bigger, despite the fact that Dan recently decided that aerobic exercise is a “thing” and Bob has more or less stayed low carb. Joining our awesome Northeastern Co-op student Ralph Peterson (who has been working with Alex on behavior) are three more Co-op students – Jesse Katon (also working on new methods for behavioral analysis), Neha Bhagat and Alex Williams (both working to deliver optogenetic reagents to across the olfactory cortical mantle). This summer saw us visited by Max Burkholder, who plays Max Braverman on the TV show Parenthood, and who worked with Ally doing molecular biology. All these new people needed some place to work so we (temporarily) built a lab expansion next to our new colleague Matt Pecot’s lab to get some elbow room.
OK, enough blogging for now. Back to science!