8 people sitting in a conference room watching The Princess Bride on a projector screen

Pizza, popcorn, and The Princess Bride.

Some Tuesdays just need to be a lab movie night!

Couldn't think of a better candidate to be on the ASCB Council!

A mocha frappuchino with a drawing of a cell on purple

I chat with the barista's at Starbucks about our research and they've taken to drawing cell related things on my coffee (one even visited the lab)! I present to you all a cilliated cell on my Frap!

Who says science communication can't be fun or tasty?!

Some of my favorite Vandy people highlighted here!

Is PI life modifying a grant proposal as you're finaling last minute things for your brother's wedding in T-minus 16 hours?!

Just have to make sure I don't bring up signal transduction in my speech or childhood stupidity in my grant!

Even then, it makes more sense to have it spread out over a few years so we can spend it on personnel, which makes more sense.

Also, I'm not hiring 8 people at once, even if I could

I would much rather have early-career researchers like myself have a higher chance to actually get a grant than get a grant that's frontloaded. I likely cannot spend it in a year anyway, unless we can now just buy expensive capital equipment like microscopes and mass specs on them, which I doubt.

The FOMO

The Starbird lab has been doing such a great job of sharing excitement for our ongoing work with our Biophysics community!! #BPS2026

Ok, so this is pretty awesome actually!

How X-rays and crystals revealed the true nature of things - NobelPrize.org The story behind the 100-year-old discovery that continues to render Nobel Prizes.

Very excited to share my love of crystallography in this article celebrating over 100 years of X-ray methods and the Nobel Prize for BBC and the Nobel Foundation:

www.nobelprize.org/stories/x-ra...

One Western is worth 7 meetings! Hopefully you got lunch

Thanks Tig, definitely looking forward to seeing how this line of research develops further!

Fellow new PI success PSA! @krishnamudumbi.bsky.social et al have an awesome preprint out! Super psyched to connect with @jasonzxzhang.bsky.social as well, I see collaborations in our future 😀

It was such a fun journey working with Krishna’s lab and @kinasekid.bsky.social! Really excited to see where this phospho-binder technology goes!

A graduate student in a pink hoodie and blue jeans pinning up her first publication on a cork board.

The inaugural pinning of a paper on our publications board!

Proud #NewPI moment!

Thanks Chrystal, so proud of my team!

Not new, but a new to us update:

The first preprint out of my lab! We joined forces with @kinasekid.bsky.social @jasonzxzhang.bsky.social and David Baker to study protein phosphorylation! Congrats to Isabella from my lab on her first first author paper! tinyurl.com/43jwwfua

Three people sitting around the board game Carcassonne with cookies and coffee

Impromptu board games and cookies for those of us that lost power doing Snowmageddon!

8 people sitting at a long table with drinks and menus

Mini golf with @phdgprotein86.bsky.social and Jeeyeon Cha's labs, followed by pizza!

Great way to kick off the first lab outing of the year!

A collage of two pictures. On the left is a picture of 6 people in a tissue culture room doing work. On the right is a picture of 4 people stacking two incubators on top of each other.

At the one year mark, and we went from stacking incubators to a packed TC room!

#NewPI

A 35 year old letter to the editor, written by a very ballsy 15 year old, about the Rodney King verdict.

Remembering today that having your heart broken is a necessary step on the path to becoming fully human. Whichever heartbreak is your first, it’s probably critical that a state break your heart so that you can develop a political imagination. If this is your first, I’m sorry and also welcome.

Burnette Lab paper: "Pharmacological Inhibition of β Myosin II Disrupts Sarcomere Assembly in Human iPSC-Derived Cardiac Myocytes" is out! This image is of beta myosin II filaments in an iPSC-derived cardiac myocyte. #CellBiology
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Anything from Tool really, but Ænima is a classic from the mid 90s

8 people sitting around a poker table with cards and poker chips on the table.

High stakes poker game at the CDB holiday party with my office at stake!

Rest assured that I managed to keep my office - the PI poker face is a real thing!

What an amazing #CellBio2025! What I took away was that the cell bio community was just as vibrant as ever. Despite the challenges of the past year, I heard so much exciting science and celebrated many accomplishments of my friends and colleagues! Thank you! 🙏🏾

Happy Nobel Prize Day to those that celebrate! Thanks for highlighting our work its connection to Stanley Cohen!

Happening tomorrow! Bring your own coffee 😁

Excited to host this session on Wednesday with these lovely ladies and some new friends that we made as well! Come check out the amazing talks that were selected!

5 people in front of the ASCB Cell Bio 25 sign

Just two new PIs and our labs! @adelitadmendoza.bsky.social @ascbiology.bsky.social #CellBio25