I am currently on maternity leave with baby #2. How does one manage the responsibilities of a PI while on maternity leave in the middle of a pandemic? I will not lie, it's not easy and I don’t have it figured out. Since the beginning of 2021 though, my infant son and I have been …
Author: joan.yuan_PI
Trine is a Swedish Research Council international postdoc grantee!
My first PhD student and now postdoc Trine Kristiansen finally got the confirmation that her application (which was initially shortlisted) for International Postdoc Fellowship is going to be funded by the Swedish Research Council! I am so happy to see her move on to pursue her passion for stem cell biology with one of the …
Continue reading Trine is a Swedish Research Council international postdoc grantee!
Staying focused during a pandemic
During the first quarter of the year I had been hitting the marks on my work goals. Submitted a collaborative grant, visited the University of Montreal and attended the B cell Keystone conference in beautiful Banff, Canada, where I gave my very first invited Keystone seminar. The feedback on Stefano’s project did not disappoint and …
Co-writing a grant
This year started with a fun challenge, to write a collaborative KAW grant with a close colleague, Katharina Lahl. Katha is a true mucosal immunologist and cool person. We began working together for the first time over two years ago as teachers in the immunology course for Master students in the Biomedicine program. It didn’t …
First author interview with Stijn Vanhee
I'm beyond proud of our recent paper in Science Immunology finally seeing the light. It was accepted almost exactly one year after our first rejection. Here is an interview with our first author Stijn Vanhee who was a postdoc in the lab from 2015 to 2019. Stijn has since moved on to the next chapter …
Celebrating team diversity
Hope you’ve had a good summer. This summer I completed the yearly staff evaluation process with my lab members where I meet with each person to go over their past performance and areas for future development. This meeting is formal in the sense that it is a responsibility delegated to me, the PI, by the …
Distractions in disguise
At the beginning of the year I made a goal to submit 3 manuscripts from our lab in 2019. (Note that the goal reads submission rather than publication, the latter being something we have little control over.) Previously, we have never managed to submit more than one a year😱. My excuse was quality before quantity. …
Editing a manuscript
Stijn and I are in the process of editing a manuscript that has been a looong time in the making. We had submitted it for the first time last summer to a prestigious journal and, after extensive review, it was ultimately rejected. The four reviewers' comments were fair and, after briefly licking our wounds, we …
How I start writing
When I entered biomedical research as a PhD student, I had no idea that writing would play such an instrumental part in my career. Luckily, my PhD advisor drilled into me the importance of writing from day one (Thanks Tim!). Now that I am a PI, writing is practically all I do. In the creative …
The case for starting a blog
During our last annual Yuan lab retreat (November 2018) we discussed the good the bad and the ugly of social media and how we, as a research team as well as individual scientists, should engage this immense digital space. The conclusion was both unanimous and somewhat unexpected. I had thought, despite my reluctance to enter …
The Yuan lab 