We had a great day of science and community to celebrate the beginning of the year with the Cellular Biology Department retreat. So grateful for the work of the CBIO GSA, Dr. Cai, and all who made this a successful event! Kathleen and Jazmine also presented their work and represented the lab well!
Lab Cleanup Day!
Grateful for these hardworking women for all they do scientifically. But today, also grateful for their hard work in cleaning and organizing our lab space so that it is ready for a new year of science and discovery. Thanks all!
Career Development Week 2026
Yay Macey!
We had a really wonderful time with our career development week this year! Graduate students used our Career Development Mega-list (linked HERE), completing 74 unique career development activities and earned a total of 668 “points” based on our big list. Macey was the CDW winner this year, though we always emphasize that everyone is a winner! Macey had a great week engaging in career development toward charting goals for herself and for her future career.
We also chatted with PhD-holding folks from a wide variety of career paths. Common themes of our conversations were the importance of networking, the value of collaboration and independence (in balance), the importance of reading voraciously, and the various twists and turns that can be part of all different kinds of successful careers and career paths. Here are some of the folks we spoke with:
Dr. Jamie Alvey (Clinical Research Scientist and Associate Director, Genmab)
Dr. Keaton Schuster (Associate Editor, Nature Communications)
Dr. Ko Currie (Director of Research Programs and Partnerships, Parkinson Canada)
Dr. Sam (Seung Woo) Kang (Postdoc fellow, Vanderbilt University)
Dr. Sarah Knutson (Independent Consultant and Operational Project Leader, Rome Therapeutics; industry career path in early drug development)
Dr. Amy Pyle-Eilola (Director of Clinical Chemistry, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Associate Professor, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center)
Dr. Jessica Carpenter (Lead Medical Writer at BOLDSCIENCE)
Several of these guests went to graduate school at Vanderbilt with Rachel, were at UIUC with Rachel, or were graduate students at UGA. Ko was also a former planarian-ologist. So it was great to reconnect with classmates, lab neighbors, colleagues, and former Bulldogs, and to learn what each of these wonderful humans is doing these days. Some of the careers represented in this group of speakers were new to us and to CDW, so students really learned a LOT (and so did I). It is so fun to see Ph.D. students “matchmake” with career paths and options. I love when a student’s eyes light up when they learn about a new option for their future. One interesting thing that I have noticed this year is that several students have several distinct ideas that they are interested in pursuing—not “backup” plans, but really multiple career paths of equal or near-equal interest. There are lots of great paths for Ph.D.-trained scientists and I can’t wait to see what my current trainees do next!
Congratulations to Taylor and Kendall!
Congratulations Taylor and Kendall on the acceptance of your paper after a very thoughtful and elegant revision with lots of fun new data! Will update soon with more paper info!
We Facetimed with Taylor to celebrate with a toast and decided on mimosas since she only had time in the morning!
Congratulations Dr. Clay!
We were so excited to celebrate the defense of our wonderful student, Kendall Clay! She did a fantastic job writing her thesis and presenting her work at her oral defense. We are so proud of the research she has completed and - as I said at her defense - she is something like an octuple threat - she is a great teacher, fantastic at writing, passionate about outreach and service, talented at making science-related art, and more! It has been so fun to be part of her journey. Congrats, Dr. Clay!
