The Dickson Lab group members Arzu Uyar (co-chair of the Community Outreach Committee at Graduate Women in Science), Nazanin Donyapour (Ph.D. student), and Maria Olivero (visiting student from Colombia) attended to the 2018 Hiawatha Science Fair with their booth entitled "Biomolecular World". They did activities with the students at the Hiawatha Elementary School to encourage their interests in protein structure and function, drug design, viruses, and DNA. Their booth was full of fun and very sweet because of the marshmallow biomolecule models. (They dedicate their outreach work to the scientist Stephen Hawking).
Arzu was named May's International Scholar of the Month by the Office for International Students and Scholars. She was invited to present her work at the J-1 International Scholar Showcase, and was a member of a panel of international scholars answering questions to help aspiring students. Congratulations Arzu!
I'm happy to announce I will continue the Planetarium show this year at the MSU Science Festival! I'm sure it will be even more fun than last year, with cool new videos to show from research in the Dickson Lab. There will be two shows: Saturday April 8th at 4 pm, and Saturday April 15th at 11 am. Hope to see you there!
Sam won a Best Poster Award at the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Departmental Retreat! Congratulations on the award! The poster is up on Zenodo and can be found here.
The Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (iCER) just did a research highlight of the Dickson Lab. Check it out here! It gives a good overview of our research, its applications, and how iCER has played a key role so far! Many thanks to Adele (Xiaoxing) Han who did a great job filming and editing this video.
We are pleased to welcome Arzu Uyar, our first postdoc, joining us all the way from Istanbul, Turkey. Dr. Uyar received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees from Bogazici University, and has developed expertize in coarse-grained modeling and elastic network simulations. We are happy to have her in the lab!
MSU held the 11th annual Grandparents University day, where grandparents and their grandchildren can take a variety of courses together.
As part of the annual MSU Science Festival, Alex presented a talk aimed at middle-school audiences (What Happens to Molecules When You Turn Up the Heat?) at Abrams Planetarium. Using VMD, and dome-formatted rendering commands, this talk included images and videos that stretched over the dome, giving the audience the impression they are immersed in the molecular environment! It was a lot of fun to hear the oohs and aahs from the 8 to 10 year-old crowd!