Leadership

By
President: Adrian Rivera-Reyes
Vice President: Jamie DeNizio
Treasurer: Liana Vaccari
Secretary: Ian McLaughlin
Discussion Group Coordinator: Annie Chen
Advocacy Coordinator: Shaun O'Brien
NSPG Liaison: Tierra Moore

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NIH to chimera researchers: Let's talk about this...

By
by Chris Yarosh
When we think about the role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in biomedical research, we often think only in terms of dollars and cents. The NIH is a funding agency, after all, and most researchers submit grants with this relationship in mind. However, because the NIH holds the power of the purse, it also plays a large role in dictating the scope of biomedical research conducted in the U.S. It is noteworthy, then, that the NIH recently delayed some high profile grant applications related to one type of research: chimeras.
Chimeras, named for a Greek mythological monster composed of several different animals, are organisms that feature cells that are genetically distinct.  In the lab, this commonly refers to animals that contain cells from more than once species. Research into chimeras is not new; scientists have been successfully using animal/animal (e.g. sheep/goat) chimeras for over 30 years to learn about how animals develop. Human/animal chimeras are also a…
Read more

Communicating about an Epidemic in the Digital Age

By
Image
**Link for live streaming of this event can be found here**

by Hannah Shoenhard, Jamie DeNizio, and Michael Allegrezza
Craig Spencer, a New York City doctor, tested positive for Ebola on October 23. The story broke online the same day, and by the next morning, tabloids were plastered with images of masked and gowned health workers with headlines such as Bungle Fever and Ebola! Late-night comedy, Twitter, local news: the story was inescapable, the hysteria palpable. All in all, only eleven Ebola patients were treated on U.S. soil. But the media’s reaction affected the lives of anyone who watched television or had an internet connection.
The Ebola epidemic in Africa has died down. Liberia is Ebola-free, while Sierra Leone and Guinea continue to report cases in the low single digits per week. Most promisingly, a new vaccine has been shown to be highly effective in a clinical trial. Given the vaccine, it seems that the likelihood of future epidemics on the scale of the one in 2014 is low. Bu…
Read more

Penn Science Spotlight: Learning how T cells manage the custom RNA business

By
Image
Chris Yarosh

This Science Spotlight focuses on the research I do here at Penn, the results of which are now in press at Nucleic Acids Research1. You can read the actual manuscript right now, if you would like, because NAR is “open access,” meaning all articles published there are available to anyone for free. We’ve talked about open access on this blog before, if you’re curious about how that works. 
First, a note about this type of science. The experiments done for this paper fall into the category of “basic research,” which means they were not designed to achieve an immediate practical end. That type of work is known as “applied” research. Basic research, on the other hand, is curiosity-driven science that aims to increase our understanding of something. That something could be cells, supernovas, factors influencing subjective well-being in adolescence, or anything else, really. This isn’t to say that basic research doesn’t lead to advances that impact people’s lives; quite the oppos…
Read more