Graduation is one of the most exciting experiences, both as a student and as a mentor 🙂 The excitement never diminishes year by year – it is the best part of being a professor, indeed! Congratulations Dr. Ian. Adventure is out there 😀
Time flies… 2021 has been unexpectedly busy. In somewhy, I miss the COVID time. It seemed the time machine suddenly slowed down. Without many commitments and meetings, I enjoyed much-needed quiet time to read and think… With 2020 is in the rare mirror, we are back to a fast-paced “modern” society again. The calendar was
About one and a half years ago, I wrote about the topic of mentoring morphogenesis of a Ph.D. You can read it here on my thoughts on essential traits that make a good candidate for being a researcher. As similar to all mentor-apprentice relationships, the relationship is two-way traffic. In this post, I’d like to
The remote party can be super fun! We have started a new (and old) tradition of Gingerbread house making competition. While there are beautiful houses here and there, no design can compare to Farya’s scientific themed Gingerbread house! We all won the competition. Yeah!
An instant messaging app called “Slack” has become more and more popular among research labs. I was wondering what is the benefit of using it? While waiting for my grant proposal to be assembled and submitted, I read a little on the differences between Email and Slack. These are two useful, while very different, communication tools. There
I was reading a letter forwarded by my friend. It is a letter Xiaodong Wang wrote to his son, who is about to start his own research journey. Xiaodong is a humble scientist and one of those I admire the most. His son is someone who is very ambitious in launching his own research career
I love photography! I am pretty into the genre of photojournalism/street photography. To me, the most soul-touching photos are always on the topic the capturing human conditions. There is tremendous humanity embedded in those photos that go beyond beautiful colors and sceneries. I brought a lot of photography books. One of the recent ones is called “The Family Imprint”. What’s
The whole world is in the midst of the COVID-19 chaos! I think that “social distancing” should not be a very painful pill to swallow for us. Most of the time, doing research is a “solitaire”. One of the unexpected benefits of “social distancing” is it leaves a surprisingly cleaner daily calendar. Without many out-of-control
Building a successful career in biomedical research has become increasingly challenging. Becoming a successful scientist in this current highly competitive biomedical field is almost a “miracle” in some ways – it is a magical blend of personality traits, some productive mentor/trainee relationships, and some good luck! What are the essential personality traits? For the trainee,
