New Paper on the Evolution of Skin Color

I was toodling around my Google Reader today over lunch when I spotted a link in the Scientific American blog feed about genes related to skin color.  Since that is something I study, I clicked through to Scientific American which led me to the EvoAnth blog.  I was reading along when I suddenly realized they were talking about MY PAPER which is already available online (here) and will come out in print sometime in the next few months. So since other blogs are talking about it, I thought I'd mention it here as well. :)

That's two papers down and one to go to meet my goal of three papers published by April! I did publish this commentary in November as well, but it wasn't on my research so I'm not going to count it towards my goal.  I'm so excited to have one of the papers based on my dissertation work published and I hope to have the other out soon as well.  If you want to keep an eye on my publication record (and I know you do), I set up a Google Citations site a while ago.

Okay, enough self-promotion for today.

The Doctor will See You Now!

Last Wednesday I defended my dissertation. About twenty people came to see it which I really appreciated and it was great to have the support. I felt really positive about how my presentation went as I stepped out into the hall so that my committee could talk for a few minutes before I came back into the room to answer questions. Instead of asking me to come in for questions, my adviser came out into the hall, gave me a big hug, and said "Congratulations, Doctor!"

They passed me without questions! We did talk some more afterward but all the pressure was off. This picture is me popping champagne so that the cork dents the ceiling in the lab. Then I got to sign the dent"Dr. Ellen Quillen."

Rollercoaster Week

I’m sorry for the long delay since my last post, the last couple weeks have been really overwhelming. Briefly, for about three weeks now, I have known that my adviser was considering taking a job at another college starting in January. Thursday the 20th he told us that he would be taking a one-year leave of absence from Penn State effective the following Monday. He can remain my adviser but it means that he won’t be around for the last year of my research and my dissertation writing. Thankfully he can still sit on my committee and we are trying to work out how to keep in good contact during this year. My plan is still to graduate next August but I will have to be extra disciplined for the next year. I’m trying to look at this as an opportunity to really take control of my own research and be accountable to myself rather than anyone else.

To that end, I’m trying to figure out what needs to get done and create deadlines for myself. I have a bad habit of underestimating the amount of work I can get done in a day/week/etc., so I have started using this online to-do list that allows me to estimate how long a particular task will take and how much time it will take. (For example, I needed to prepare a bunch of data for analysis and estimated 4 hours, it took 12 hours, but I’m a much better perl programmer for it.) I’m trying to keep the daily estimate under 8 hours. If you want to keep track of what I’m doing (you probably don’t, and I’m fine with that), here is a public link: http://voo2do.com/pub/EQ_research. This week I am working on developing a set of genetic markers that reliably detect stratification in a sample so that it can be corrected for in analysis. Well, that is the long term goal. Really I’ve just been writing perl scripts to manipulate 2 gigabyte text files into something manageable. It’s a mental muscle that I haven’t stretched in a while and I’m finding it oddly satisfying.

In other good news from this week, our junior graduate student who decided to go with my adviser left a TA opening so I picked up a half TA-ship for Intro to Biological Anthropology which equates to a tidy little bump in my monthly paycheck and my NSF funding came through this week!! Within a week or two I should have the budget number to pay for the genotyping I need to do for my dissertation research.

This may sound like a downer of a weak, but though it has been stressful, it has also been productive. But I’ll be back soon with a bunch of fun stories and pictures from Sarah’s wedding. TTFN!

This Isn't What I Signed Up For

Let me start out by saying that I really am not complaining. I do love my job (most of the time) and the fact that I get to be the first person to ever know something about the genetics of human beings is unfailingly cool - even though it is usually something that other people wouldn't find that interesting. But it comes to my attention quite often that the reality of research is very far away from the concepts and challenges that first drew me to science.

Punnet squares transfixed me when I was 12 and I first came to love genetics. Now instead of Punnet squares, I apply statistical algorithms of varying degrees of complexity to determine the likelihood of two brown-eyed parents having a blue-eyed child yet I tell my students that it is 1/4 (just the way I learned it was 14 years ago) even though I know that isn't true. Once I reached undergrad, I got to spend my time running PCRs and determining genotypes by gel electrophoresis. It was like a miracle every time I mixed clear liquids together, heated and cooled them and then ran them through some glorified jello to produce glowing pink bands that told be about a person's DNA. Now I spend my time in front of a computer writing bits of code (with about a 5% success rate) to manipulate the genotype data I payed someone else to generate.

The point is this: I came to grad school because I love genetics and now all I do is statistics and computer programming. While these aren't my favorite things, I have no beef with statistics or computer programming the problem is that I thought I would be doing "Genetics" - amazing things like what I read in my text books. What no one tells you is that the breakthroughs that make it into textbooks are the culmination of an entire lifetime of work boiled down to half a paragraph. Only Darwin and Mendel get whole sections. The reality of any job that we dream of, even ballerina and astronaut, never quite matches the way we imagined it. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, nor something I'm just now realizing, but it is something that I have seen strike many of my friends and colleagues.

People who loved school and pursued degrees in art history, theater, meteorology, anthropology, English, and so many other exhilarating subjects found that there aren't really jobs where you get to "do" English or art history or anything else. For a few of the lucky ones, there are jobs that use their skills but usually not in the way that they had hoped. For an even more select few, we get to do what we wanted. And because I am one of those lucky few, I am truly grateful. I do get an occasional rush from research that I don't get anywhere else. But it was a knowing smile I gave my student the other day when he came in to talk to me about double majoring in Anthropology and Philosophy. I hope he enjoys writing copy.