This is an interesting article that talks about how certain things that seem intuitive become accepted as conventional wisdom (“truthiness”). “Apparently horses in races are almost always (98%) whipped.* The main reason is to make them go faster. Congratulations to the scientists from the University of Sydney who won a ...
Friendship and colleagues
In the academic world, the coming of spring brings more than migrating birds and warming temperatures. We can also count on seminars filled with faculty candidates, and prospective graduate students flocking to elaborate departmental recruiting events. Little time has elapsed since I was an interviewee in the latter category, but ...
Nudging Doctors In Intensive Care Unit Reduces Deaths
Physicians for critically ill need “copilots” to remind them of important details By Marla Paul CHICAGO —- Caring for patients in a medical intensive care unit in a hospital and flying a 747 are complicated tasks that require tracking thousands of important details, some of which could get overlooked. That’s ...
Patrick McMullen awarded PhD
On Friday-the-thirteenth, Patrick successfully defended his doctoral thesis. His work involves building tools to understand complex biological systems through the application of physically-grounded models. He will be staying with the lab through the end of the summer.
Anthropocentrism and biology
A recent The Scientist commentary on a recent paper (D. Dickinson, et al., “ A polarized epithelium organized by beta- and alpha-catenin predates cadherin and metazoan origins,” Science, 331: 1336-39, 2011) makes some wonderful points about the working and evolution of biological systems. The first point relates to anthropocentrism: “Yet ...
Accountability and the Research Enterprise
The Republican leadership has recently turned its attention to “wasteful” research sponsored by NSF (see YouCut for details.) In a youtube video, Representative Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) calls for Americans to search the NSF database and report “wasteful” grants and cites two projects as examples of such waste, a $750,000 grant ...
Adam Pah and Nicolás Peláez win Chicago Biomedical Consortium Research Awards
Congratulations to Adam and Nico on their selection as two of the three Northwestern University recipients of research awards by the Chicago Biomedical Consortium. The monetary awards will go towards paying for their research expenses.
The Amaral Lab welcomes Dr. Filippo Radicchi
Dr. Filippo Radicchi received his Ph.D. in Physics from Jacobs University in Bremen (Germany) in 2007. He joins the lab as a post-doctoral fellow. His research interests are focused on the application of methods and tools of statistical physics to the study of complex systems and networks.
NRC Rankings have arrived
(Revised Oct. 3, 2010) The long awaited for NRC rankings have arrived and, as expected, lots of controversy ensued. To avoid suspense, I will state up front that I am convinced that someone has finally gotten the rankings right. The notion espoused by the 1995 NRC rankings or the annual ...
Patrick McMullen named Runner-Up Distinguished Graduate Researcher
Patrick has been selected as the Runner-Up for the 2010 Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering Distinguished Graduate Researcher Award. Patrick accepted the honor at this year’s department retreat, at which he was invited to speak about his work.
Irmak Sirer Awarded Teaching Assistant of the Year
Congratulations to Irmak Sirer on receiving the 2010 Teaching Assistant of the Year Award for the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department. Irmak was selected for the award based on student nominations and faculty feedback.
The Amaral Lab welcomes Dr. Jane Wang
The Amaral Lab welcomes Dr. Jane Wang as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Dr Wang earned her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the University of Michigan in 2010. She will be taking up a joint appointment with the Booth Lab in the Department of Communications and Disorders.
Nicolás Peláez passes his qualifying exam
Congratulations to Nico on an excellent talk and the successful defense of his proposal! He is now a Ph.D. candidate.
Making microarrays a truly high-throughput tool
Download manuscript Microarrays are nowadays a widely used tool for probing the set of genes expressed under different conditions. In spite of the fact that this technology has been around for about 15 years, there is still a widespread distrust of the experimental results obtained through microarray experiments. Because of ...
Peter Winter receives fellowship from the Interdisciplinary Cluster of Predictive Science
Peter has been awarded a fellowship from the Interdisciplinary Cluster of Predictive Scienceand Engineering Design, which celebrates collaborations across department lines. Peter, who works jointly between the Amaral Lab and Richard Morimoto’s group in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, will receive support for training in modeling and simulation techniques.
Footballer Rating: Using science to identify true football/soccer stars
World Cup 2010 player ratings [dead link] Listen to All Things Considered (NPR) Interview (Guy Raz) Check latest Cosmic Log on our analysis (Alan Boyle, MSNBC) Listen to Science News (Science) podcast Listen to Scientific American podcast (Cynthia Graber) Listen to National Academy of Engineering’s Engineering Innovation Podcast and Radio ...
Mentor-protégé relationships: Age gap really does matter
Listen to the Nature podcast | Download manuscript A new Northwestern University study of mentor-protégé relationships has found something that parents and children have known for a long time: the generation gap is real, and it matters. It not only affects communication but also who mentors young mathematicians successfully and ...
Dr. Sawardecker-Amundsen successfully defends her PhD Thesis
Erin N. Sawardecker successfully defends her PhD thesis. Erin has worked on verifying the effectiveness of different algorithms in detecting the group membership of nodes within a network. She has taken a job at Conoco Phillips and will be starting this summer.