Online research symposium ongoing

Today was the opening of the entirely online Undergraduate Research Symposium. My video is available for viewing and people can ask questions in the forum. I answered one this afternoon. It's nice being able to compose a response rather than needing to answer verbally on the spot.

Learning to visualize proteins

My grad student suggested I start experimenting with tools for protein structure visualization. Protein structure is a Very Big Deal in biology, so I should definitely get comfortable manipulating it. Today I spent some time tinkering with PyMOL on our protein of interest.

Documenting for handoff

Since I'll be graduating this semester, it's important that my fellow course staff understand the systems I worked on so they can continue development and maintenance. Over the summer I contributed some complicated features to a project. This semester I periodically met with the project's maintainer to explain and clarify the code. We finished going over the last of it today.

Decided on grad school

Yesterday I collected my thoughts about future plans and decided to commit to the Genome Science & Technology graduate program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. I notified the coordinator of my decision and created my account in their system. They suggest that I get moved in during the first week of August.

Highly distinct

A month ago, I finished and submitted my undergraduate thesis to the MCB department as part of an application for research distinction. I have now received an email notifying me that I received Highest Distinction in Research based on my thesis and the poster I presented last year. Soon after, I received another email saying I've received Academic Distinction in the department based on my GPA in the major.

Remote lab work

This evening I started doing some of the remote computational lab work discussed last week. After a good deal of fiddling with alignment tools, I produced a figure (well, a block of monospace text) showing the equivalents in other species of the protein region skipped by one of our splice variants. There are indeed commonalities in that region.

Keeping the app running

Virtually all students are out of campustown, but the bus system is mostly still running as usual. A couple days ago the company published a partial data update that seems to be inconsistent with some of their other systems, causing a lot of departure information to vanish again. This has happened several times before, so I was prepared and able to work around it enough to get basic departure information. Interestingly, by AdMob metrics, app use didn't completely flop last month despite the lockdown.