March 9, 2019
This week the IQ Biology students had Innovation and Skills Training with Kevin Parker from KKi Associates (http://www.kkitech.com/index.php). According to his website, this is the “UK’s longest established provider of training in commercial and financial skills for scientists and technologists”. Kevin spent the whole day teaching us about science communication and financial skills. His wife, who works in finance and has a degree in chemistry, was his assistant and helped to calculate the stock market prices in our game where we were given $50,000 to invest in different start-up businesses. Kevin spent his early career as a lubricants specialist with BP and then left the industry. At one point during the oil spill in the Gulf, he was asked by a journalist to assess the spill relative to sunken oil tankers in the same area during WWII. He found that they were roughly equivalent. Kevin trains students and professionals in entrepreneurship, something which is common for BioFrontiers faculty and students to tack on to their academic careers. We also had our final rotation talks this week. They went well, and we greatly appreciated the second-year students attending and supporting us. The talks felt less serious this time because we all knew what to expect, but I do think the discussions and questions afterward were more intense and exciting than they have been in the past. I think this is a good sign that we are gaining confidence in ourselves and research generally. As we move into the second half of this semester, we begin the team rotations. We were all assigned a group and a mentor who presented us with our team science topics. The topics are: 1) Are cancer cells immortal and if so, what does this imply? 2) Reduce the rate of decline of pollinators by 50% by 2025. The third project involves working at the children’s hospital and thinking about negative test results in cancer detection. All of the topics are complex and exciting. I am very excited to get started on my pollinator topic because this is an issue I have heard about for a long time but have never taken the time to think about in depth. We have the first month of the project to define the problem and to really delve into the scientific, economic, and social dimensions of the problem. We were encouraged to consider if 2025 is too late for the pollinators. We were also encouraged to think globally since problems and solutions in America are going to look very different from problems and solutions anywhere else. We are also starting on group projects in Dr. Peleg's class, Biologically-inspired multi-agent systems. This has been a reading and discussion type course so far where we think about biological systems and how they might inspire technological design, like robotics. Now, we are working on our own projects which will include making our own models to answer questions. I have been thinking about asking, how can external influences (like Russia) actually change American public opinion to influence elections. This should be a fun question to tackle. Of course, moving on from our third rotations is bitter sweet. I’d like to thank the Larremore and Clauset labs for adopting me for 8-weeks and showing me what they are able to do with computer science. I really enjoyed my time with all of these people who taught me, most importantly, that computer scientists are the best at explaining things because they are so logical and clear and concise in their language. I aim to be more like you all in this way.
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
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