Datta Lab

Datta Lab

Spring Is Here….

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….and with it new blood for the lab! First off, Dan Bear, a current Program in Neuroscience student, is permanently joining the lab as a graduate student. Dan’s work will focus on the molecular biology of the peripheral olfactory system, and in particular the transcriptomics and genomics of different functional classes of olfactory sensory neurons. Tari Tan, also a PIN graduate student, is rotating in the lab and working on a project to use optogenetics to modulate odor-driven behaviors. Tari, who hails from Oregon, comes to us after an impressive undergraduate career where she developed molecular biological tools to probe the neural underpinning of sexual behaviors in sheep. Welcome to them both!
  Tari, both pre- and post-injection. You can’t tell from this picture, but she has KISS 108 blasting in the background.  
Dan Bear, surfing the genome. Apparently, Dan went to Harvard College as an undergraduate, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at him.

Datta Wilson Sled Showdown.

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About two weeks ago we got the following note:
Needless to say, we accepted the challenge. After a couple of weeks of careful planning and team meetings, the Wilson lab built four beautiful sleds out of sheet plastic and heavy cardboard that were clearly aerodynamic, slick and sturdy enough to go head-to-head with a classic Flexible Flyer. 
Wilson Lab Team Sledding

Joe and Mehmet, representing for the Wilson Lab
We, on the other hand, got a bunch of crates and a staple gun on Saturday afternoon, and two six-packs later, called it a day. 
Datta Lab “Bobsled.” It would be ironically named, but only if it moved.
Datta lab, also representing. Except with somewhat less velocity.
Predictably we got blown out the first two races, the group challenge and the bobsled.


Finally, it was time for the Wilson/Datta showdown, mano a mano. But since Bob’s sled (really a biohazard bag stapled to a long piece of dirty cardboard) had already fallen apart, the Wilson folks were kind enough to lend a sled so the Datta lab could at least complete the competition.
Before the final showdown.
In the end, we bought the beers at the Pig for the Wilson Folks and toasted their good fortune. A great time was definitely had by all. We just need to bring more glycerol to the table next year, and perhaps some tacks.

New additions to the lab

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A big Datta lab welcome to our two newest members – postdoctoral fellow Andrew Giessel and rotation student Alex Wiltschko. Andrew comes to us after a fantastic run as a graduate student doing synaptic physiology in Bernardo Sabatini’s lab, and will work on in vivo optical imaging and electrophysiological characterization of behaviorally-relevant structures in the basal forebrain. He also rocks a sweet tattoo of a wheat stalk (recalling his Kansas roots) that looks just like a pyramidal neuron. Alex, who is joining a project to optogenetically manipulate olfactory cortex, hails from Texas and has as whole side career writing technical iPhone Apps (including an excellent spectral analyzer). Welcome to them both!

Alex performing bimanual molecular biology

Andrew thinking hard about what to image next

Congratulations to Paul Greer….

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…for winning the Nancy Lurie Marks Foundation Fellowship! This award, which runs for three years, will be used to fund Paul’s postdoctoral project developing in vivo approaches to identify specific odorant receptors for behaviorally-relevant scents.

Holiday Oyster-Fest

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The end of the first full year of the Datta lab was celebrated in appropriate fashion – with lots and lots of raw seafood. Drinks were drunk and health advisories about water-borne parasites were ignored. We joined the Sabatini lab for after-dinner festivities at the bar adjacent to the restaurant, which included lots of early 80s rap and plenty of cheer. Happy Holidays everyone!
48 raw oysters
Dan and Paul, stunned the year is over.

Perfectly capturing the ethos of the lab….

Yum?

Fall Lab Outing to Spookyworld

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There are many fall traditions enjoyed by New Englanders – apple picking, leaf peeping, turkey frying….and visits to Spookyworld. One might think that, as reasoning adults, a trip for the lab to a seasonal horror themepark would not be too frightening. Turns out: still pretty Spooky! Our amygdalae definitely work. Plus we now know how our mice feel when we expose them to predator odors.

Spooky fried food!!
Stan, Mo and Masha at the Spooky Go-Karts
This bizarre creature kept following us. Definitely Spooky.
Fine, we did Jello shots. I thought this was pretty Spooky,
but the rest of the lab thought it was normal.

Lab culture

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As the lab gets up and running we have been talking a lot about lab culture – what makes for a great lab, and what we can do to help ours along. Most published advice is written in management-speak or 70s-style psychobabble (yuck and yuck), but we were pleased to come across the work of systems biologist Uri Alon, who writes and talks incisively about these issues all the time. In addition to his science songs –

– he has some excellent resources on his web page, including some great essays by Cori Bargmann on graduate school culture.

Fall Rotation Students

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The Datta lab is hosting two great rotation students this fall from the Program in Neuroscience. Dan Bear, is a recent Harvard grad and is working on single cell profiling methods. Rachel Donahue, a Bowdoin grad who hails from northern California (not far from the LBC!), is focusing on automated analysis of odor-driven behaviors and is developing new lines of reporter mice. Welcome to both!

Summer Lab Shout-Outs

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Work from the lab was recently highlighted in an article in Harvard Medicine about the five senses. Bob was recently awarded a Giovanni Armenise Foundation grant to study the neural basis for the primal fear of asphyxiation; this award and the related work are described in an article in the Harvard Focus. Bob also won an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, which is intended to support promising young scientists from a wide range of scientific disciplines; the award is described in an article in the Harvard Gazette.