Community Voices

This guest post is contributed by GSA member Jeremy Yoder of the University of British Columbia. (More about this author)   Scientific workplaces are not particularly diverse. The underrepresentation of women and people of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has become a field of study in itself, with experimental and observational data…

In 2014, six undergraduate researchers received Victoria Finnerty Undergraduate Travel Awards, supporting their travel to GSA’s Annual Drosophila Research Conference to present their work. These recipients were among nearly 200 undergraduate students attending the 56th Annual Drosophila Research Conference from March 4-8, 2015, in Chicago, Illinois, providing a robust undergraduate population in a welcoming community…

Today’s guest author is Razib Khan, who is currently a graduate student in genomics at UC Davis. Outside of his scientific work he is interested in history, religion and philosophy, among other things. You can follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/razibkhan. If the story of the last century was the maturation of physical science, the plot of the coming…

This is the first in a series of profiles of GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Krista Dobi Assistant Professor, Natural Sciences Department Baruch College, City University of New York Research program: My lab uses…

Today’s guest post was contributed by Maria Costanzo of Stanford University. She has been a biocurator since before the term was coined and has contributed to genome database projects for a variety of fungi. The views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter: @mariaccostanzo.   When someone asks what I do for a living,…

Today’s guest post is contributed by Jesse Dunietz, co-founder of Public Communication for Researchers (PCR), and PhD student in the Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. You could be forgiven for thinking that a talk titled “Is there a war on science in the US?” would be a bit of a downer. But for…

Don Gibson (University of California, Davis) describes how he decided to start the Barbara on the Bill Campaign When I heard that the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced that a woman will be on the $10 bill, I started reading several articles about which woman it should be. I was shocked that so few women…

At Millsaps College, a private, liberal arts school in Jackson, Mississippi, GSA member Sarah Lea Anglin united with her colleagues Debora Mann, Kristina Stensaas, and Timothy J. Ward to write a proposal for a curriculum development grant. This inter-departmental proposal was successfully funded in 2012. Finding funding for curricular reforms can be a daunting and…

Mark Blaxter (Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh) reports on the “Caenorhabditis Genomes Project” workshop at GSA’s recent 20th International C. elegans Meeting. Caenorhabditis elegans, affectionately referred to as “the worm,” is one of the prettiest and most informative of the model organisms. It is see-through, has a simple lifecycle and a remarkably simple anatomy,…

Technical tips and progress on worm CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering   Today’s guest post was contributed by Mike Boxem, Daniel Dickinson, and Alexandre Paix. Mike Boxem is a group leader at Utrecht University. His interests include technology development, systems biology, and cell polarity. Daniel Dickinson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of North Carolina.  His interests include…

Today’s guest post is contributed by Todd Plummer, a Research Associate in Gordon Lithgow’s lab at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Todd is a certified California Naturalist interested in the ecological relationships that affect wild strains of worms used as model organisms. Follow him on Twitter: @plumtodd  This post first appeared on SAGE, a blog focused on the science…