CeLL BIOPHYSICS LABORATORY

University of Maryland

Fischell Bioengineering Department

3135 Kim Engineering Building

College Park, MD 20742

P: (301) 405 8250

F: (301) 314 6868

E: helim@umd.edu

 

 

All group meetings will be held on Wednesdays beginning at 2:00 p.m. in Helim’s office. Meetings will last 2-3 hours. Schedule for the semester is as follows:

*Note change in date of December 17 meeting – This is a Friday, due to the ASCB meeting which is December 11-15.

**Sometime during the week of December 20 we will have an end-of-semester lab holiday party.

General meeting format

All meetings will follow the following format:

             A. Presentation of food (5 minutes)

             B. Lab issues (5 minutes)

             C. Photo contest, if scheduled (10 minutes)

             D. Presentation of paper or research and discussion (60 minutes)

             E. Short updates (15 minutes per person; 60 minutes total)

 

 

Food

Food is an integral part of science. Hungry people do not think well. It is highly recommended (rather, mandatory) that the designated person on each day bring some type of snack to share with the group. Sometime during the week of December 20 we will have an end-of-semester lab holiday party, and each person should bring a dish to share.

 

Lab issues

This is the time to discuss problems and issues in the lab.

 

Photo contest

On the last Friday in each month, everyone should bring in their coolest research picture. It must have been generated by you! No stealing pictures from someone else’s paper or website.

 

Voting procedure: Each lab member present at the meeting will vote on their favorite picture by writing it down on a piece of paper. The votes will be counted and the picture with the highest number of votes wins. If this method results in a tie, then each lab member will rank each picture in order of favorite to least favorite, with favorite getting number one and so on. Then, for each picture the total number of points will be added up, and the picture with the lowest number of points wins. The winning picture for each month will go on the lab website.

 

Pictures in general should be produced within the month prior to the contest; however, since this is a new activity, in the first few months you can use pictures generated at any point in your time in the lab.

 

Lab clean-up

On these days we will spend about an hour cleaning up the lab at 1:00 pm prior to the group meeting. Everyone must attend, and if you cannot, we will save you the worst chores to complete. J

 

Paper presentation

If you are presenting a paper, you should choose an interesting paper related to your work or the lab’s work. You must email the chosen paper to the lab group by at least Friday prior to the meeting in order to give the group sufficient time to look over the paper.

 

You should prepare a Powerpoint presentation to summarize the paper. The Powerpoint does not have to be fancy, and therefore you should not spend time in making it look pretty. Rather, you should spend your time thinking about the paper and evaluating it. You should cover the following topics with respect to the paper:

             1. Why did you choose this paper?

             2. How is this paper related to your work or the lab’s work?

             3. Background material necessary to understand paper

             4. Materials and methods

             5. Results/discussion from paper

             6. Your evaluation of the paper

             7. What do the results of the paper mean for your work and/or the lab’s work?

 

You should plan to summarize the paper in about 30 minutes, and we will reserve an additional 30 minutes for discussion from the group.

 

Research presentation

If you are presenting research, you should prepare a Powerpoint presentation on your current research project. This is your opportunity to share your work with the group and get constructive criticism and suggestions for future work. The format of this presentation should be as follows:

             1. Short introduction and motivation

             2. Previous work by you that leads into the current work, if applicable

             3. Current work, including data, pictures, movies, plots, anything you have!

             4. Future experiments planned or in the works

 

You should plan a 30 minute long presentation, and we will reserve an additional 30 minutes for discussion from the group.

 

You should take this presentation seriously and use it to practice your scientific communication skills.

 

Short updates

At the end of each group meeting, each person will be given the opportunity to give a short (15 minute) update to the group. This should include current work in the past week or two. Ideally, this would include pictures, movies, data analysis, etc., from a recent experiment. If you have been working on something like a research paper or Ph.D. proposal, then you should mention this and briefly explain to the group what the paper is about and what stage you are at in writing it.

 

Hint: it is very helpful, in giving your short update, if you first remind the group briefly (in one minute or less) what your project is, what you are going to tell us about, and how your current piece of data or experiment fits into the overall scheme of your research project. If you start talking about some obscure piece of data without putting it into context, it is difficult for the rest of the group not only to understand what you are talking about, but also to provide constructive criticism and advice.

GROUP MEETING SCHEDULE AND FORMAT