Week 7: Regan

This week I had lots of opportunities to attend lectures and meetings related to lymphoma. On Tuesday I went to the thesis defense of a student who works in one of our collaborators' labs. His thesis was entitled "Epigenetic Silencing in Humoral Immune Response and Lymphomagenesis". In a nutshell, the PhD candidate studied the relevance of DNA methylation on the turning on and off of genes that lead to B cell immunity and separately to B cell lymphomas. His work was focused in both germinal center B cell and activated B cell diffuse large B cell lymphomas, the latter of which is typically more aggressive and harder to keep at bay. Despite my background in lymphoma research, I will admit that I had a difficult time keeping up with his thesis points. His training was in computational biology, something I am only remotely familiar with, which definitely contributed to the complexity. Even though I didn't understand much of the talk, I am glad I went. I think every opportunity you can get to get more and diverse exposure to your field is valuable. I may not have understood much this time around, but there is still hope for the future.

I also had another valuable opportunity this week in lymphoma. Every month my lab participates in a lymphoma group meeting where lymphoma basic and clinical researchers of WCM and Cornell University meet and give updates on their research. It is also a forum for brainstorming new approaches and collaborations that can advance lymphoma research even further and faster than before. This meeting always happens in NYC, and so I usually have to video-call in to participate. Despite the advances in modern video-calling technology, I always seem to miss something when I have to view the meeting from Ithaca. Being able to participate here in NYC was priceless because now I have a really good feeling for the state of the field of lymphoma research. Keeping in touch with your field is a good idea for researchers in all fields and so I am thankful to have this opportunity to sit at the lymphoma table. This event also allowed me to network with the researchers down here, something vital yet difficult to do because of the geographical boundaries between our two campuses.

All in all I had a good week. All of this exposure to lymphoma research excites me. Now I am more passionate than ever to be a part of researching lymphoma, and cannot wait to get back into it upon my return to Ithaca. New York City, you've been great, but now I'm ready to leave and excited to do so.

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