It's our great pleasure to welcome Selene Sodini to our lab. She is originally from Italy and is joining us from a Masters programme at the University of Edinburgh where she has been working at the intersection of stem cell biology and biophysics. She will be studying the qualitative differences in neonatal and adult B …
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 …
Moving to Sweden
I am driving home for Christmas… I literally am, while writing these lines. In my case that means an approximate 12-hour train ride from Sweden to Germany. Not too bad, if everything goes according to plan (usually not the case). However, it makes me start thinking why I decided to live and work abroad in …
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 …
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. …
Welcome Sneha!
We are excited to be joined by a new postdoctoral fellow, Dr Sneh Lata Gupta, a newly minted PhD from the National Institutes of Immunology (New Delhi, India). She goes by Sneha and is an expert in B cell immunology. Welcome to the Yuan lab and the DMH community Sneha!
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 …
The Yuan lab 