Retreat! Retreat!
The entire department went on a retreat this past weekend, which was a grueling but pretty wonderful experience. We have a rather large department (arond 50 labs, spread across vast swaths of biology, including microbiology, cell biology, development, neurology, virology, cancer research, metabolomics, mathematical biology, bioinformatics, systems biology, structural biology, biochemistry, infectious disease, and so on), so trying to get an idea of what’s going on here is a rather Herculean task; the retreat not only allows us first years to get a sense for all the labs and talk to faculty and older students, but it also allowed lots of grad students and professors to talk about research all day and form new collaborations. It almost seems like a third of all the research presented during the retreat was done in collaboration with another lab. It was a great thing to have almost as soon as I got to campus. I bonded with other grad students, met almost everyone in the department that was there, found other labs that were doing great research, and learned a heck of a lot of biology.
We invited a great guest speaker to the retreat as well, Charles Ofria, a computer scientist who researches the evolution of “digital organisms” — computer programs that can self replicate, compete, and mutate. He started off with the story of Core Wars, in which programmers wrote programs to fight each other for control of a computer, to Tierra, where programs could mutate and evolve, to his Avida system, which allowed Ofria to control and analyse almost any aspect of the evolution of the organisms. He was able to look at a large variety of theoretical problems, including the evolution of complex traits (e.g. critically examining the arguments of Behe’s “irreducible complexity”), fitness changes in a rugged landscape, and the ecology of programs in various systems. Fascinating stuff, really. I can see why he was hooked when he learned about Tierra; perhaps if I had learned about that really early in my life, I would have chosen a completely different intellectual path.
Anyway, after almost 15 hours of talks in two days, practically living on coffee the whole time, I’m a bit tired. Tomorrow, we get our first rotation assignments!
