Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Tim's Group Meeting

By schedule, we have no group meeting this week because Tim would be out of town. But somehow Tim postponed his trip and decided to have a meeting as a volunteer to present his ideas about how what we are doing fits into a bigger picture.

There are several main directions in our lab - microtubule, actin, cytokinesis, mitochondria, and Tim's new favorite, cancer studies. Tim admitted he is the kind of person who enthuses about something for a while and then jumpping to another a another while, and finally back to the original one like a circle. He apologized for that.

Most of the work Tim mentioned are done by former postdocs in our lab. Leaving postdocs in our lab are always allowed to bring their own projects with them. And we won't to anything in conflicts.

Tim joked Paul and Bill are special. Usually a leaving postdoc is dying to hear his boss says "I am not going to touch your project anymore"; Paul and Bill both ask Tim to do more experiments on their own projects in the future. Tim feels it is funny and Bill says it is to increase the scientific mass of the project!

It is really a special experience being in this lab. Just like what Chris had said during her defense - this place, it a very unique place for doing research. She didn't mean the school, bur rather this department, or more specificly, this lab.

We have three new postdoc candidates visiting in the near future. The first one, Ethan Garner from Mullins Lab at UCSF is coming next Tuesday. The other twos are a physicist, and a biochemist.

And of course, free meals again for having lunches with those candidates!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Red,

I am impressed by Tim's volunteering to give group meeting. It shows (to me at least) that he treats people in his lab as colleagues and collaborators rather than just pairs of hands!

Tree

Red said...

Actually, Tim was on the rotation list for a very long time, but skipped few after we moved to SysBio from CellBio. (It spends about 6 months to run-over the list once!)

He apologized for it too; said part of the reason is none of his experiments worked these days.

Usually Tim's experiments are very tricky, and in most cases, Tim probably is the only person in our lab knowing how to do it.