18 May 2020
It’s been over 2 months since we’ve been in the lab. While it was challenging, I was really impressed with how everyone in my group was able to make progress on both their research and/or training in multiple different ways. A quick accounting of our time away from the lab. We revised and finalized Belle’s review for publication. We revised and finalized Julia’s manuscript, which will be published in the coming months. We wrote and posted a preprint of Bibi’s work to bioRXIV, which has now been submitted for publication. Further, we’ve made substantial progress on multiple other manuscripts (from our lab and collaborating labs) that will be submitted in the near future. Apart from our publications, three students finished writing their candidacy proposals, even though the dates for their exams have not even been set. One student finished an NSF grant proposal (due in the fall) and two others finished drafts of their NIH predoctoral F31 applications (due in late summer). Finally, the entire lab contributed to completely revising our website. Obviously, I’m not a fan of being away from lab and suspending our research efforts, but I was quite proud of how the Wiseman lab managed their time away to continue their important work directed towards defining the therapeutic and pathologic implications of stress-responsive signaling in disease. I have a great group of people I get to work with every day, and this shutdown has just provided more opportunity to highlight how lucky I am to be surrounded by such outstanding scientists. That all being said, I’m grateful Scripps has found a way to safely reopen under restrictive conditions, allowing us to continue our experiments. While I enjoyed my weekly Zoom meetings with each and every member of my group, I’m amazed by how much time has opened up now that we have returned to their preferred meeting schedules. Further, it’s hard to explain my joy and excitement to get our first piece of new data after being out for 2 months (shout-out to Aparajita for making it a good piece of data!). I’m proud of everyone in the lab for how we weathered this shutdown, but I’m grateful that this great group of scientists now gets to go back to what they do best… making discoveries! - RLW