We are very excited that Jeyani took first place in the poster session at the Women in STEM Symposium for her poster on DNA origami! The first annual Women in STEM Symposium was hosted by the Women of Whiting on the Johns Hopkins campus on March 25, 2018.
We welcome Shyamaa Khan who is the high school student participating in Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program. Oludunsin will mentor Shyamaa to investigate muscle atrophy at microgravity. We hope you have fun, Shyamaa!
After weeks of anticipation, MAFIA members attended the ASCB annual meeting in Philly with excitement.
Of course we met old and new friends, dined, chatted, and laughed together, thanks to Matt P’s super organizing power!
We learned a lot from the talks, and gave some talks ourselves. Seven talks to be exact.
Seungman talked about mechanical characterization of engineered tissues.
Jenny talked about drastic morphological changes and cell motility modulation in multiple cell types upon sudden mechanical stimuli.
Khalid talked about tunable bioink development for 3D printing.
Nick talked about cancer cells mechanically remodel the microenvironment.
Deb and his beanie talked about the responses of epithelium to hydrostatic pressure changes under physiologically representative conditions.
We also presented our research progress during the poster sessions.
Seungman explained how immunosupression can be coupled with mechanosignaling.
Nick and his TME poster (and Yun).
Tanner explained how to build a new computational model to predict the mechanical properties of DNA origami.
It was a blast!
A fleeting moment of the daily routine at the lab is captured. People are working (and wearing lab coats).
Prof. Wallace Marshall from UCSF visited Hopkins to give a highly anticipated departmental seminar. As the hosting lab, MAFIA members got to hang out with Wallace and discuss our projects in length. We learned a great deals of science and life wisdom. Thanks for accepting the invitation and visiting us. We look forward to meeting you in weeks at Philly again!
This year MAFIA members disguised themselves as bearded/fanged pirates and a shiny pony to celebrate Halloween.
With the thinking beard on, we had a spookily good group meeting!
We are very excited to learn that Wei-Hung, Jenny, Debonil and Khalid are selected for Travel Award to attend and present their Research at The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) – European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) 2017 Annual Meeting this December (see http://ascb-embo2017.ascb.org/# for details). Seungman, Deb, Wei-Hung, Brian, Jenny, Khalid and Yun will be giving talks, and Nick, Khalid, Guohao and Tanner will be presenting their research projects at the poster session at ASCB in Philly on December 2nd-6th. We look forward to the big party!
We bade goodbye today to our summer intern Huang. Huang has spent a very productive summer with us in MAFIA for the image processing research project. She is going back to China to finish her undergraduate degree. We wish Huang the best of luck. We will miss you Huang!
As the tradition long established since 2016 dictates, braving the nature, lab-bound MAFIA members observed our mandatory summer hiking day today at Rock Creek Park in Washington DC.
It was a nice cool day to hike. It also helped tremendously that we had picked a route that was 95% covered in shades.
We hiked along the Rock Creek for almost 2 miles, almost 3 times lengthier than the route we took last summer in West Virginia *. At this rate, we might be able to call ourselves outdoorsy by 2019.
The creek (in the background of the picture above) was at its high water mark because of the heavy rain in the previous night.
We made some equine friends along the way. They were very friendly.
We had a very rewarding hour* hiking in the nature. Everybody was hungry by 10 am after the excursion. We posed for the happy group picture for one last time and went on our merry way to wait for lunch-serving restaurants in DC to open at 11 am. We devoured our lunch (data not shown).
It was a blast! Kudos to Nick for organizing the event!
* numbers were processed by the ceiling function for the purpose to appear impressive.
Deb, Wei-Hung and Brian were selected to present their research at the 2017 Global Grand Challenges Summit (for details see http://ggcs2017.org/) in DC this week.
The 2017 Global Grand Challenges Summit (GGCS) is the third in a collaborative series sponsored by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
The 2017 Summit aims to inspire the next generation of engineers, policymakers, and the public to address critically important engineering challenges and opportunities facing humanity. It will focus on the four themes of the NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering: Sustainability, Health, Security, and Joy of Living, as well as Education, and Public Engagement related to the Grand Challenges.
Our posters attracted quite some interests. Job well done, team DWB!
