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 …
Category: blog
Doing a PhD, from impossible to reality
When I started my undergraduate studies in biosciences back in 2011 at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, I never had the intention of doing a PhD. Honestly, I had no clue what a PhD student did, nor what it meant to work in science. Growing up in a small village in central Germany, science …
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. …
What makes a good writer
Writing a paper represents the ultimate step of our work, the jewel on top of our scientific crown. We condense years of experiments, failures, hypothesis and models in a few-page-long manuscript and the impact of our research depends on how good we write it. Unfortunately, I will admit I’ve always been intimidated by writing. Whether …
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 …
A PCR is like an apple pie
In our lab we always say: If you can bake a cake, you can do PCR😊. Just follow the instructions for the desired chemical reaction. Mix all the ingredients and put it into the oven/PCR machine. But don´t forget to add Taq polymerase/baking powder. Karin's latest PCR gel Back in the late eighties, or maybe …
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 