We start off our lab meetings with a guided meditation led by my friend Jeremy, another student in the Axel Lab. My postdoc Bianca brings us a variety of delicacies each lab meeting so that the sensual excitement can accompany the intellectual one.
I have been working as a research assistant in the Axel Lab for just under 3 months now, and I have had to opportunity to present in lab meeting multiple times, an experience I cherish as I had not been given the opportunity once in my last lab. Presenting your ideas, your results and future directions in a powerpoint allows you to hone a diverse set of skills- not only do you have to come off as knowledgeable and informed, but also amiability, a skill often under emphasised in scientific prowess, since what use is science if it cannot be communicated effectively? As I had some experience conducting wet-lab research, my postdoc encouraged me to start working on a new project, involving exogenomics (a field unfamiliar to both me and my postdoc). This entailed thinking of the budding stages in the experimental pipeline that I had never been exposed to before, such as figuring out what exosomes even are, how are they studied, what their relevance is to our grater research umbrella, and what a sensible experimental design would look like.
This involved a lot of reading, especially as I had no prior experience with epigenetics/neurogenetics except from popular science sources. I learned how to use pubmed and, coupled with the calculus based statistics class I was taking this semester, I felt like I had a deeper understanding of data and the shortcomings of various inferences made in academic research.
The pipeline also involves innovating and optimizing ways to test various things within the context of the Axel Lab. I found myself synthesizing information from various papers to find all the loopholes. For example, how could a method for isolating exosomes in the blood be combined with an isolation mechanism from cell culture? I was asked to write protocols and update the shared notes my postdoc and I had to keep her in the loop with my progress.
From formulating a question to putting it to the test is a skill I have very much acquired over the semester, and will continue to hone as my research experience progresses. Rather than getting drowned in the minutia that is neurogenetic research, methods need to be synthesized with questions other papers prompt in order to design a project that fits within, but also breaks away, from the research landscape. In other words, one needs to know the research done and being done well enough to build off of it, but also challenge it.
