During October, we had our first Cancer Biology Graduate Program rotational students. The Cancer Biology Graduate Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides first year graduate students the opportunity to spend their first semester, outside of class time, rotating at one month increments between several different laboratories. These months of full-immersion in different labs help the students to more clearly define where they would like to take their PhD work for the following years. At the conclusion of each month rotation, the students present proposals of how their potential projects align and coincide with the direction of the lab’s work.
While we had not yet begun wet-lab experiments, the two graduate students were able to work on different kinds of image analyses that are instrumental in the lab’s future projects. Along with becoming skilled in the respective image analysis programs, our October lab team began learning about Dr. Suzuki’s post-doc work and the proposed projects for the lab moving forward. We had internal lab meetings in the form of journal clubs twice a week where we discussed selections of scientific journal articles relevant to the Suzuki lab’s focus. The graduate students also had the opportunity to travel with Dr. Suzuki to the Nikon Imaging Center at Northwestern University in Chicago for a day-long microscopy seminar, all fully funded by Nikon. We greatly enjoyed having the rotation students with us for October.