Summer Research Leads to Boston
Hi – I’m Satyam Khanal from Kathmandu, Nepal, and I am a senior biochemistry major doing research this summer as a Walsh Summer Research Fellow in the lab of Dr. Seann Mulcahy. I will be blogging this summer about my experiences in (and out of) lab.
On Thursday, June 18th this past week, as I was getting ready to continue my research in Hickey Hall, Dr. Mulcahy, our PI, announced that we had the opportunity to go and see the 15th Annual BU- Center for Molecular Discovery (BU-CMD) Symposium on the next day. We were immediately interested at the opportunity of going up to Boston to attend the event. From my own past experience, symposiums, seminars, poster sessions, etc. are excellent ways to gain more knowledge on the current research conducted by other groups and to learn more about application of chemistry in other, overlapping fields–especially medicine. So, I was naturally excited when I met my research team at the train station on Friday morning. We took the commuter rail up to Boston and got off at Back Bay Station. It was a 20-minute walk from the train station to the Life Science and Engineering Building of Boston University. While we walked, Seann showed us around, and we passed by the Public Library, which was also close to the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Seann also showed us the direction of the close-by Fenway Park, home turf of the Boston Red Sox. To amuse myself, I counted all the Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks coffee shops that I could see (by the end of the day, DD won 5-3).
After we reached our destination, we grabbed a quick breakfast provided by BU-CMD and then the symposium started off with opening remarks by the Director of BU-CMD Professor John A. Porco. He explained that BU-CMD focused mainly on discovering novel, small molecule chemicals designed to be used as medicinal probes. The seminar presentations that followed Dr. Porco’s introduction were on the same track. The first seminar given by Dr. Paul Hergenrother from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was titled “Traversing the Valley of Death to Anticancer Drug Discovery.” During the presentation, he explained how difficult it is for organic molecules made in the synthesis lab to actually make it through to the drug industry. It was captivating for our group, especially because we also synthesize organic molecules in lab for research–it was good to see the application of research similar to ours in the real world. Dr. Alanna Schepartz from Yale University gave the second talk–“How EFGR encodes and decodes chemical information”. She explained how an extracellular messenger molecule communicates with complex proteins that are embedded in the cell membrane and how this process affects signal transmission inside the cell. I was glad that I had already taken biochemistry in the past year. I understood most of what was going on and I found the talk especially fascinating. After the seminar ended, we had a very good lunch break (the coconut macaroons were delicious) and then we decided to leave since it would take us a good amount of time to get back to PC. Thus we headed back, discussing all we had seen, taking in the beauty of Boston in the middle of summer and looking forward to doing something noteworthy in lab ourselves.
Satyam
