Goals related to manuscripts, lab work, PhD milestones, etc. See post for details!
Sea Star Work
Pubathon
I’m working on combining into one paper the two projects I have RNAseq data/analyses for from Summer 2021 and Summer 2022. The Summer 2021 work is the adult Pycnopodia helianthoides that were exposed to tissue homogenate from a wasting adult P. helianthoides compared to controls. The Summer 2022 work is the same methods, but with the addition of juveniles in order to compare adults to juveniles immune response.
Goal is to have draft of this paper done this Spring and I’ll be making progress on it through this month (and beyond until finished), keeping accountable to my weekly goals for that with the Roberts Lab Pubathon.
Summer 2023 extractions
I was gone for 3 weeks of March on a trip to FHL for eelgrass and then on a short trip to visit some family in Juneau, Alaska, so I didn’t get to the extractions like I had hoped. Thankfully, I don’t have many to extract for our initial round of sequencing goals, and so my goal for April is to get those extraction time chunks into my calendar ASAP and get those samples extracted and prepped to send for sequencing.
Coursework
I’m taking 3 courses this quarter, though one is only 5 weeks, and the other two are on Tues/Thurs so after the 5 weeks are up, I’ll have open and flexible Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays again for other work.
GENOME 569 (5 weeks only)
This class is great and we’re learning “Programming skills and software tools for building automated bioinformatics pipelines and computational biology analyses.” The main focus is using single cell RNAseq data for our class projects.
ENV H 547 (lecture 2 days/week)
I’m hoping to get a certificate in Climate Change and Health, which involves a few courses and one quarter of a 3-credit literature review project. I want this certificate because I think it builds nicely on my One Health Certificate I got when I was at SAFS for my MSc, and that it will help me with career trajectory goals of getting into a One Health-type field, with a marine health emphasis, because many One Health projects are more geared to terrestrial habitats, like farms, etc. I think the marine organism health is an understudied component in One Health projects, and I hope to eventually get to a place where I can advocate for the importance of it in issues related to human health and environmental health.
Anyway, the course is awesome so far and I’ve been really enjoying it.
FISH 541 (lecture 2 days/week; 1 lab 1day/week)
This is Steven’s environmental physiology class, which is already so extremely helpful only 1.5 weeks into the quarter. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken the time to refresh my memory about things like cellular biology, homeostasis, etc., and it’s been fun to be in a classroom setting re-learning these things. For our lab section, we get to choose what RNAseq projects we want to work on, so many of us are using it as an opportunity to dig into our own datasets. I’ll be (I think so far at least) using that time to do comparisons between summmer 2021 and 2022 results to see what’s similar/different across the two years. And I can also grab publicly available data from other star species like Pisaster ochraceus etc, and pull those into the comparisons as well.
PhD Milestones
One of my committee members has been unavailable for a while, but their availability is opening back up at the end of this month, so once they are back, I aim to coordinate with my committee members a time to meet in May/June to go over my plans.
In preparation for that meeting, my goals are to (after confirming what needs to be done in the student guidebook, which I will do soon):
- Dissertation Proposal - to get approval from committee, and then submit
- Plan of Study - get approval from committee, and then submit