Visitor of the Week: Chandler McElrath

Meet Chandler McElrath of the Medical College of Wisconsin! A member of Dr. Adriano Marchese’s lab within the Department of Biochemistry, Chandler joins us this week for the Ubiquitin, Autophagy & Disease virtual meeting. This is the first CSHL meeting for the second year graduate student and also her first time interacting with the ubiquitin community as a whole.

Tell us about your research.
I’m interested in how ubiquitin regulates GPCR signaling and trafficking. I study this in the context of the chemokine receptor CXCR4 and cancer metastasis.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
I had two undergraduate research experiences, studying the ubiquitin-proteasome system and GPCR signaling, respectively. I was thrilled to be able to find a dissertation lab where I could study both of these topics.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
I would not be where I am today without Dr. Jamie Scaglione. In addition to serving as my undergraduate academic advisor, she presented me with my first research opportunity at Carroll University which sparked my love for research. In 2017, this project extended into a summer experience in the laboratory of Dr. Matt Scaglione at the Medical College of Wisconsin (now Duke University) where I was introduced to the ubiquitin proteasome system. Fantastic mentorship propelled me into my PhD studies at MCW. As a professor someday, I hope to be able to do the same for my students.

Where do you see yourself in five years?
I will have graduated from MCW with my PhD and pursuing my career as a biochemistry professor focusing on undergraduate instruction.

What do you love most about being a researcher?
I love being able to ask and answer questions that no one else has before and contribute to the world’s understanding of how our cells operate.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
Ever since one of my undergraduate research experiences, I have been particularly interested in the ubiquitin proteasome system. I picked my dissertation project based off this interest, and I am excited to attend a conference with a group of people all passionate about similar subjects!

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
I learned quite a bit about ubiquitin binding domains to detect different types of ubiquitin chains, and this will prove useful for developing protocols in our lab to learn more about how ubiquitin is involved in GPCR regulation.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering participating in this meeting?
Take the time to integrate information that you learn at poster sessions and at seminars!

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
This was my first time interacting with other professionals in the ubiquitin community, and everyone was so welcoming and willing to answer my questions. As a young graduate student, it was neat to directly communicate with people whose publications I cite frequently! I look forward to meeting everyone in person at a future meeting.

Thank you to Chandler for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Image provided by Chandler McElrath.

Visitor of the Week: Kathleen Abadie

Meet Kathleen Abadie of the University of Washington! She is fourth year graduate student in the bioengineering department and a member of Hao Yuan Kueh’s lab. Kathleen joined us at last week’s Systems Immunology meeting — her second Systems Immunology meeting — where she presented her first talk as a graduate student titled “Early CD8 T cell fate programming revealed by time-resolved RNA sequencing and time-lapse imaging in single cells.” Here’s what she shared about that experience:

This was my first time giving a talk at a conference as a grad student. It was a great experience, and I’ve been so grateful to people who have reached out with questions and ideas. It’s a nice reminder of how supportive and collaborative the scientific community is.

Tell us about your research.
I research T cell fate decisions – that is, how does a single naïve T cell that encounters a foreign pathogen give rise to multiple populations of functionally distinct progeny in ratios that are tuned to the nature of the threat? This question is relevant for better understanding and subsequently engineering T cells for therapy and also for understanding broader gene regulation principles in differentiation.   

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
I worked at a pharma company before grad school (Genentech), where I found inspiration both in scientific curiosity and the potential to bring new, better therapies to patients. When I decided to go to grad school, I wanted to work in an area that was exciting both for the pure biology and for the therapeutic potential. T cells are just that! The immune system, and T cells in particular, have so many amazing properties to explore, and the potential of engineered T cell immunotherapies to revolutionize treatment for cancer and other diseases is really exciting to me.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
Thanks for asking this. It’s always nice to reflect on why we are where we are. When I look back on my scientific journey, what really stands out are the mentors I’ve had who have shared their own scientific excitement with me, helped me find my own, and given me real-life examples of what I see as a satisfying and successful scientific career. I can think of a handful of people who just lit up my brain when we talked, and I’m so lucky to have had those influences. One of these is my current PI, Kueh!

If Kathleen is not in the Lab, she’s usually on the bike!

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
I have a few answers to this. I hope to someday be able to provide the same inspiration to developing scientists as the people I mentioned above provided to me. I also hope to contribute new ideas to the field of immune cell fate control and immunotherapy. Lastly, I hope I can play a small role in the big and exciting task of engineering T cells to treat disease. 

What do you love most about being a researcher?
I love facing a totally unknown problem and thinking about how to creatively address it. On the flip side, this is probably also the most painful part of being a researcher for me. It’s so hard to know that what I am doing is ‘useful’ or ‘the right direction,’ which causes a lot of angst. I think in the end, dealing with this paradox will make me a better and stronger person (at least, that’s what you have to tell yourself in the low points of grad school).

What drew you to attend this meeting?
This meeting is such an exciting union of different fields – basic immunology, genomics, mathematical modeling. It’s amazing to see all the techniques and expertise come together here and listen to people share ideas across fields. I think the potential for synergistic progress here is vast, and I want to be a part of it!

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
A big takeaway for me is that there are a lot of creative ways to analyze data, particular those so high dimensional and rich as single-cell sequencing data. I should consider how these techniques could help me get more out of my data, even though it is often intimidating to get a new computational technique up and running in my hands.

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
It’s a toss-up between Ron Germain playing a Joni Mitchell song in the middle of his talk and Uri Alon singing about autoimmune surveillance of hyper-secreting mutants.

Thank you to Kathleen for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Images provided by Kathleen Abadie.

Visitor of the Week: Marjan Farahbod

Meet Marjan Farahbod of Simon Fraser University (Canada). The postdoctoral fellow is a member of Dr. Maxwell Libbrecht’s lab where research focuses on gene annotation. Marjan joins us at this week’s Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics virtual meeting – her first meeting at CSHL.

Tell us about your research.  
I am working on obtaining a better understanding of gene regulatory mechanisms using epigenomics data. In particular, I am trying to understand gene regulatory mechanisms in lung function and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
During my PhD, I worked on the inference of gene function and regulation from transcriptomic data. I am interested in gene regulatory mechanisms, data characterization and method development--this project has all these elements to various degrees. In recent years multiple epigenomics datasets have become available, making it possible to study gene regulation using this form of data. There is much work to do here and I am excited about it.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
My mentors and colleagues. Then there is the curiosity, the complexity and the never-ending thread of questions; along with the creativity and the ideas that lead to the answers!

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
I admire the collective effort of researchers to find answers and solve problems, and I see my work as a small contribution to this effort. I hope to share my skills and ideas, lead projects and inspire.

Where do you see yourself in five years?
As a relatively new postdoc, my contribution to the field has been mostly my research products in the form of publications. In the next five years, I hope to inspire and lead new research efforts.

What do you love most about being a researcher?
Perhaps being surrounded by the excitement of the unknown. The abundance of questions, and that there is always something interesting going on. Research can be intimidating too. Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by how much I don't know at the beginning of a project, but once I start the actual research, the curiosity takes over. 

What drew you to attend this meeting?
The meeting was a great opportunity to hear from the experts in my field and learn about its recent advancements. Specifically, it was great to hear from Professor Anshul Kundaje on their work in motif syntax, this is relevant to my project and something that I will look into. 

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
At the end of her keynote talk, Professor Daphne Koller briefly talked about the key advancements in different fields through time, and where we are today in our field. Her description resonated with me and was inspiring.  We are in a unique era, where the technical advancements in high-throughput biology and machine learning allows us to ask questions that we were not able to ask 10 or even 5 years ago. To think what will be possible in the near future, and how many questions we will be able to answer is exciting. 

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
Perhaps not specific to this meeting, but usually for me the keynote talks provide high-level views of the field and its challenges so I try to attend all of them, even if they are not directly related to my research. For the talks, I attend the sessions that are most relevant, and those are usually from the authors or labs that I know of or am familiar with their work. Posters are even more focused, and there is a chance to have in-depth conversations on specific approaches or datasets in the poster session.

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
I think attending the meeting in its virtual form will be quite a memorable experience. I appreciate the efforts that went into the arrangement of such a setting. I particularly liked the pictures from the mission control posted on the Slack! It was also cool that everyone was just a Slack message away.

Image provided by Marjan Farahbod.

Thank you to Marjan for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Visitor of the Week: Prashant Hariharan

Meet Prashant Hariharan of Wayne State University! The PhD Candidate is in his third year of a Biomedical Engineering program and a member of Dr. Carolyn Harris’ research group that uses tissue engineering to study and treat Hydrocephalus. Prashant joins us this week at the 2021 Brain Barriers virtual meeting where he presented a poster titled “Choroid Plexus-on-a-Chip―Characterizing a microfluidic model of cerebrospinal fluid secretion to study inflammation and hypersecretion associated with hydrocephalus”. He has presented a poster before but had this to say of his experience presenting during the CSHL Brain Barriers meeting:

This conference was certainly one of the most positive poster presentations experiences of my PhD. I had more people stop by to ask me interesting questions and give me suggestions than ever before at previous conferences. This was partially because almost every project could be associated with my own in some way. This thematic closeness of the CSH-BBB community was a unique and valuable experience!

Tell us about your research.
My thesis research involves the development of an “organ-on-a-chip” model of the choroid plexus, the part of the brain responsible for secretion of the cerebrospinal fluid. This model can be described as “a miniature, functioning diorama” of the choroid plexus tissue built using cells to study how injury affects fluid secretion in the brain.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
When I started my PhD program, I was studying the failure of ventricular catheters used to treat patients with hydrocephalus. This involved building a biobank of failed catheters collected from patients, some of who were only a few months old. This experience compelled me to research non-surgical treatment strategies, specifically drugs that could alter fluid secretion at the choroid plexus. Subsequently, I proposed building the organ-on-a-chip model to my mentor Dr. Harris and she graciously gave me room to explore the idea.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
As cliché as it may sound, my parents and my maternal grandfather are the biggest inspirations in my scientific journey. My mother was an organic chemist who sacrificed her career to support our family; she never passes up an opportunity to teach me the botanical name of a plant or to refresh my memory with bird names and cloud types. My father and my grandfather share a passion for preserving the environment and a voracious appetite for scientific literature. Together, they gave me a sense of wonder about biology and science in general.

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
During my PhD, I hope to validate my organ-on-a-chip model of the choroid plexus, and test my hypothesis pertaining to how inflammation affects barrier integrity and fluid secretion. I also hope to answer pivotal questions about the obstruction of ventricular catheters that may help reduce the failure rate. These are very small steps towards improving the quality of life for hydrocephalus patients.

After my PhD, I aspire to add complexity and expand my organ-on-a-chip model to enable researchers studying hydrocephalus, Alzheimer’s, cancer cell transcytosis, circadian rhythms, or drug delivery to the brain, to test their hypothesis quickly and cost-effectively.

Where do you see yourself in five years?
Ideally, in 5 years, I see myself in the middle of a post-doctoral program where I am diving deeper into understanding the choroid plexus using new and interesting techniques while also improving my organ-on-a-chip model and broadening its applications. 

What do you love most about being a researcher?
There are three aspects of being a researcher that I find immensely satisfying:

1. Working to improve on a skill (such as writing or giving a lecture) and making tangible improvements after years of work.

2. Iterative problem solving that ends with finding an “elegant”, simple solution.

3. Working on projects where I can move seamlessly from the lab bench to reading literature, with both activities informing each other.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
Being a biomedical engineer and a newcomer to the choroid plexus research community, it was not clear to me if my model would add value. I was looking for experts who could opine on my work and guide me in the right direction. When my mentor Dr. Harris first brought this meeting to my attention, I noticed that many of the leading researchers within my area of interest were attending this conference. I was eager to interact with them and take their feedback on my model.

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
There are a lot of unanswered questions with regards to the role of choroid plexus and glymphatic spaces in different pathophysiologies; an understanding of how fluid moves across different compartments in the brain is still elusive. Personally, my model could find a wider application in the study of different brain barriers and could pair very well with other techniques currently being used if I could find a way to incorporate primary cells from animals of different ages as well as cells from a pluripotent source.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
My advice to anyone who may attend a future meeting would be to go through the schedule before the day of the meeting and pick out the talks and posters that are of interest. Trying to sit through every talk will tire you out and reduce your capacity to absorb or process information by the last day.

Show up with questions about your own project that have been difficult to answer and network with others doing similar research to figure out how they tackled the same issues. This may seem like an obvious thing to do but you’d be surprised how much inertia there is in doing this.

Take advantage of the ‘PI Chats’ sessions to network with PIs who may be of interest to you but do not rely solely on these sessions to interact with PIs. Reach out to them before the meeting, introduce yourself and frame your questions clearly so they can help you.

Images provided by Prashant Hariharan.

Thank you to Prashant for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Visitor of the Week: Esmaeil Amiri

Meet Esmaeil Amiri of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG)! The NRC Research Associate works in a collaborative team between Dr. Olav Rueppell’s research group at UNCG and Dr. David R. Tarpy’s research group at North Carolina State University. Esmaeil was with us this week at the Biology & Genomics of Social Insects virtual meeting where he presented a poster entitled “Ontogeny of Immune Responses in Honey Bee Queens to IAPV Infection”. This is the second time Esmaeil has attended this meeting – he participated in the 2018 conference, giving a talk on “Trans-generational Effects in Honeybees―Focus on the Egg”.

Tell us about your research.
I am an integrative biologist studying honey bees: My research program combines honey bee management activities with molecular laboratory techniques and bioinformatics tools to study a) the dynamics of viruses and immune mechanisms in the complex social network of honey bees, and b) transgenerational effects and maternal investment in honey bees in response to environmental stressors.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
Well, let me go back to the time I was an undergraduate student pursing my study in Animal Science while I was a beekeeper managing around 250-300 colonies. As a beekeeper and naïve undergraduate student, I was really fascinated by the honey bee colony structure and especially the capability of the queen to produce 1500-2000 eggs per day and live much longer than any other colony member.

While I was pursuing my Master’s studies in Animal Breeding and Genetics, I found that current breeding and selection foster economical traits to the detriment of disease resistance. This was concurrent with the description of a novel honey bee health problem called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD); therefore, I decided to pursue the study of honey bee viruses as one of the main drivers of colony mortality during my PhD. My beekeeping expertise came in very handy during this time. Since then, I have sought for my research to contribute to our understanding of the ongoing pollinator health crisis and to improve apicultural practices. Honey bees are the most important crop pollinators and are also an attractive eusocial scientific model to study fundamental scientific topics.

Over the past years, my scientific interests have evolved, and I have become interested in expanding my research to understand transgenerational disease effects; including vertical pathogen transmission, as well as immune priming to enhance offspring immunity. In addition, I have become interested in life history theories and have started to study maternal investment in honey bees.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
Since I can remember, I have had a curious mind that directed me to travel internationally to several countries in different continents where I experienced multiple academic cultures. During my academic career, I met with many scientists and have been supervised by several great mentors in my research field. Every one of them inspired my scientific career in one way or another, and I am very much thankful for them. On a personal level, my mother and my wife have been the biggest inspiration for my scientific journey.

Where do you see yourself in five years?
I am passionate about pollinators, so I have decided to stay in academia and continue my research in the field of pollinator health. My research area is recognized and accepted by my peers; therefore in five years, I can imagine myself as a university professor, managing an integrative and innovative research program that contributes to move our research field toward achieving the goal of a sustainable apicultural industry.  

What do you love most about being a researcher?
The science community is very dynamic, and the vast majority is motivated to share ideas and collectively contribute to move the science forward and to help understand the nature around us. As scientists, we are walking through the unknowns to make them be known and, many times, we face difficulties and obstacles. I mostly enjoy discovering methods and ways to solve problems by generating new knowledge that then becomes a part of the existing body of science.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
In 2018, my supervisor Dr. Olav Rueppell suggested I participate and present my research findings at this meeting. During the 2018 iteration, I enjoyed being part of a larger scientific community passionate about understanding the many different aspects of social insects. I found it interesting because it enabled me to get out of my honey bee research zone and see myself as part of a bigger group studying other social insects such as ants, wasps, and termites. The excitement from my first participation in 2018 encouraged me to join again this year and I have gotten the chance to learn even more from the oral and poster presentations.

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
I gained many research ideas and learned about new methods to analyze genomic data that I am sure will enrich my future research projects. I also got the chance to meet with several other scientists and hope our discussion will pave the way for future collaborations.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
Since my first participation, interacting with so many great scientists in the meeting remains a great personal experience. I highly recommend PhDs, postdocs and other scientists in the field to participate and actively engage in the discussions.  

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
The meeting taking place virtually in the middle of the current COVID pandemic makes for a memorable event. I would like to thank the organizers who thoughtfully managed the meeting. I especially appreciate the Discussion Zones and social events organizes as a way for us participants to connect.

Image provided by Esmaeil Amiri.

Thank you to Esmaeil for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.