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Congrats to India! She crushed her senior thesis defense today, entitled “Postnatal Development of Vasculature in the Hippocampal Neural Stem Cell Niche”. And though she is graduating, we don’t have to be sad (yet). She will be joining us as a full time technician next year while she applies to grad school. We have had India’s pic on our posts frequently, so this time let’s admire one of her images. A 3D rendering of vasculature in the adult hippocampus, one of the images in her thesis. The color coding tells you the layer of the dentate gyrus (purple = molecular layer; green = granule cell layer; yellow = subgranular zone; red = hilus).

It’s Kirby Lab Mistake of the Year 2023! We celebrate our mistakes every year, with nominations and voting by everyone in lab for best mistake made in the lab. We do this to show how mistakes are normal in research. And if you make an interesting-enough mistake, you can even get a prize.

This year we celebrate:

Runnerup: Jeremy (visiting grad student in MD/PhD program) for forgetting to come to lab meeting when he was presenting

Winner: Nidhi (NGP grad student) for making licor image files so large the software crashed, which tech support says has never happened before.

Congrats to this years winners!

Once again, we have had a successful Neuroscience-Math mixer holiday party back in December. The White Elephant gift exchange was, as always, a battel to the bitter end. Also as always, I did not get many pictures. But here are some of the few I did capture:

Ashley opens her white elephant gift while Nidhi, India and Patricia watch, along with some math folks.

Ashley, Bryon and Nidhi have some food while math people lurk in the background.

Congratulations to India! She has been awarded a travel award from the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN), sponsored by the International Brain Research Organization. This was a national competition for awards of $1000 to help fund travel to SfN this Fall to present a poster. Her poster will be on display in the main poster session at SfN on Wednesday morning, November 15, 2023. Her poster is titled: “Hippocampal neural stem cell proximity to vasculature emerges during postnatal development”.

Here is India!

Josh’s first author work from his PhD is finally out in iScience. Josh and his co-authors show that glutamate transporter EAAT1 cell-autonomously supports NSC self-renewal in the adult dentate gyrus of mice. His co-authors include 2nd author and current PhD student, Ileanexis, several former undergrads (Jacob, who also got his master’s degree with us, Eliza and Dalia), former tech Ashley Walters and our collaborators for uHPLC Valentina Valentini and John Bruno.

Check it out here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223011458

Graphic summary from Josh’s paper

Congrats to Tyler Dause for smashing his thesis defense today and becoming Dr. Dause, PhD! We are all going to miss Tyler as he launches on to his next steps beyond the Kirby lab. Below, see Tyler wears the horns of victory with pride!

Tyler wears the horns of victory!

Tyler wears all 3 of his victory symbols–ears from his masters, a single horn from candidacy and double horns from PhD

Last Thursday evening, the Kirby lab was well-represented by technician Ashley Walters and postdoc Lisa Miller at the evening poster session for CBI Research Day. Below, see Ashley (left) and Lisa (right) along with their beautiful posters. We all had a great time chatting about the brain with our fellow researchers from OSU and a few visitors as well!

Ashley (left), Lisa (right)

Robert Osap, Kirby lab undergrad, presented his senior thesis work today at the Denman Forum in Pomerene Hall. Robert made an informative and lovely poster and fielded questions like a pro. Well done, Robert!

Robert poses dutifully.

Robert explains his research to am enthralled audience.

Some members of the lab were missing from our last lab pic. This has been rectified in the new lab pic.

Kirby lab 2022 (ish)

(Acknowledgments: photoshopping by undergrad Robert Osap)

Congratulations to our winners of the Kirby lab Lab Mistake of the Year for 2022! We had  9 strong contenders submitted this year, with both our runner-up and our 1st place winner making lab history.

The runner up, lab manager Bryon Smith, makes history as the first staff member of the lab to win a prize in this competition since we founded it in 2018. Bryon won because he gave some mouse breeders to another lab member, forgot he gave them to that person and then later euthanized those animals, to the surprise of the person who thought they would be using them.

The 1st place winner makes history in that they are the first winner to come from another lab. The name here has been changed to protect the innocent. Let’s call them Jax. Jax wins for using a kit in our lab (which they had permission to do), but using it in such a way that they used 3x as much as they needed and somehow misplacing several pieces of this kit.

Always remember our Lab Mistake motto: “If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not doing science!” We celebrate our mistakes to normalize them and get us all more comfortable with the awkward, error-prone process of being researchers.