It's been about 2 months at the new job now and I continue to like it a lot. It's been really busy in the lab at first but I'm happy that things are working pretty smoothly now and I am starting to get results in. My project for the next two years will be on the impacts of narcotic chemicals across multiple species. These kinds of chemicals are unique in toxicology because they don't act on a specific organ or receptor or endpoint-they sort of have a general disruption of how the cell functions, but it's not really well understood how this works exactly. I'll be using gene expression again to look at how genes and biological pathways change during exposure to these chemicals. And instead of fish I've upgraded to the much easier to work with nematode model :) This project is much more focused on microarray data analysis than I was previously, which is exciting for me because I get to learn new skills while continuing to develop on things learned in grad school.
It's also been an interesting two months using what I learned in grad school to help me get a heads up on this project, as I transition into using tools that were new both to me and to my boss. Getting a project started on a new organism isn't easy, especially when no one has done exactly what you are doing yet before (which is normal I guess for science!). I was given the task of figuring out the LC50s for over 40 chemicals for the nematodes, which isn't so hard to do for a few chemicals but looked to be a rather arduous task for the number that we had to do. But thanks to my Science MacGuiver skills, I was able to figure out something that both worked and was feasible for me to get done without having to spend weeks and weeks doing tedious lab work. I continue to be thankful for my old advisor Dave Barber who taught me the benefits of getting up and trying something new, not being afraid to ask for help from people that can give it (like emailing paper authors out of the blue) and to be open to trying just about anything. Now with the acquisition of a flatbed scanner, some open source image analysis software that my husband wrote up, and some help from other researchers in the worm business, I'm glad that I've been able to set up this analysis in a relatively short amount of time.
Another change for my post-doc is that I'm working with an academic advisor on a project that's funded by an industrial company. It's been interesting to see science from a different perspective, since before I was only doing things for my professor. The group that I'm working with at Unilever are all quite nice and are excited about what I've done so far-and it's also nice to see the project from a non-academic perspective. I'm thankful for all my experience writing reports and updates for SETAC as they have seemed to come in handy when meeting with the folks from industry :)
I'm also happy that SETAC continues to be a part of my life even after ending my time as Chair of NASAC. I'm still working with the Europe SAC on plans for the next YES meeting, am working with NASAC on getting a YES meeting set up in North America, and will be attending the Vancouver meeting in November :) I even managed to get myself involved with a meeting already here again as my advisor is organizing the environmental omics conference in Liverpool in September. Should be a fun meeting and a chance to meet some new researchers here in the UK.
Hopefully now that life has reached a happy sort of homeostasis I'll be able to write more blog posts about how things are going more often. That is if I'm not spending all my free time traveling as I've been doing these past couple weeks, and will be doing the next two weekends as well :D
No comments:
Post a Comment