Kickoff Meeting
The corals group has been meeting weekly by video-conference, but it was a treat to all gather, together with the students, and finally meet in person!! We had a 2-day kickoff meeting on November 21-22: we met Thursday, November 21 on the Tufts campus in the Boston area (hosted by Lenore Cowen), and then on Friday, November 22, we all took the Amtrak train to visit Hollie Putnam’s lab at the University of Rhode Island.
In the morning, we got an overview of coral biology from Hollie, which was probably particularly helpful to the computer science and material science graduate students. Nastassja discussed her efforts to keep coral nubbins alive and free of contaminants and algae in the lab, including a 3D chip she had printed, and brainstormed strategies with JK, Judith and Hollie. Lenore presented the work her group had done so far on the data side: her group finally got a functional genomics pipeline after many issues with CPU and memory resources up and running on the Tufts servers. We went out to lunch as a group, and then toured the Tufts campus on the way back from lunch.
In the afternoon, we heard from JK’s student about their modeling and imaging efforts so far, and then had several visitors in the afternoon/evening: Rohit Singh from Bonnie Berger’s group at MIT, Yana Bromberg (who was in town giving the department colloquium and talked to us a bit about coral microbiome bioinformatics efforts she was aware of), Donna Slonim, also from Tufts, and Caterina Stamoulis who was also in our “Ideas Lab” session (and part of a separate successful ideas lab proposal), and we were delighted to have her join us for dinner and a mini-reunion in Harvard Square. Touring around Harvard Square after dinner, some of us ran into an old friend from MIT, Jonathan King, now retired from the MIT Biology department!
Thursday we went out to Rhode Island, and Hollie’s students each presented their current coral projects to us. We then toured her lab and saw the corals that she had brought back from Hawaii to study. We also had two visitors join us in Rhode Island, Lenore’s former PhD student Noah Daniels, who is now a professor in the Computer Science department at University of Rhode Island as well, and Ying Zhang, who was also in our “Ideas Lab” session (and part of a separate successful ideas lab proposal), who presented an update to us about her project, so we could explore synergies between the groups. We said goodbye to the people based in Rhode Island and the rest of us travelled back to Boston where Lenore’s graduate student Monsurat was able to join our farewell dinner (she was presenting at a conference and had to miss most of our kickoff meeting as a result). Everyone headed back on Saturday morning!
