Welcome to Our Blog
Thank you for visiting our website. We are a relatively small lab with big ideas. We are part of a much larger group of investigators known collectively as the LLUMC Molecular Radiation Biology Laboratories. It is our hope that this website will educate, communicate, and incite scientific debate. As the PI of our little group, I hope to post our data and discuss potential mechanisms, consequences, and countermeasures. With a bit of luck we'll all learn something. The links to the left include our merry band as well as collaborating investigators and laboratories. The links to the right include our archive and blogroll. The banner above will always bring you back to the main page page. Take a look around and please feel free to leave a comment on our blog (try to keep it civil and constructive) or shoot us an e-mail. - Michael " Ubertramp " Pecaut
Lab Update
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2009.07.06
Categories & Tags: Brookhaven National Laboratory,Gamma Radiation,Grant,Grant Proposal,Microgravity,New Publication
Comments: None
I seem to have a distinct lack of content, don’t I? Which is sad because quite a few things have been going on lately.
Most importantly, Farnaz graduated. Yeah, team! Her oral defense went well, despite her butterflies and the committee was impressed. She’s off studying for her MCAT over the summer, but she promises me that she’ll come back in the fall and convert two chapters of her dissertation into two manuscripts. She better because she put a ton of work into those studies and dataz must be published! Heh. She was also awarded a travel grant for the upcoming Radiation Research Meeting in Savannah, Georgia. In fact, they selected her abstract for an oral presentation so they must have thought she did something worth hearing. Read More..
Lab Update
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2009.04.12
Categories & Tags: Gamma Radiation,Grant,Low Dose Radiation,Microgravity,NASA,New Publication,Protons,Radiation,Space Shuttle,T cell
Comments: None
It’s been a couple of months since the last update, so it’s about time. We have some good news and some bad news. The bad news first. My NASA grant was turned down for funding. I haven’t seen the review yet, so I’m not sure why. Nor do I know who or what actually DID get funded. Guess we’ll have to see.
Ironically (or coincidentally, I haven’t decided which), we received the acceptance letter from JAP for our third immune publication from the last shuttle flight on the same day. The reviewers were pretty rough on us, though. It bounced back and forth three times before they finally accepted it. Farnaz was pretty excited as this was her first publication. Woot! Now all she has to do is finish her dissertation and graduate. Hahaha. It’s still an Epub ahead of print, so I don’t have a reprint. Give it a few weeks. Read More..
Update from the Lab
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2008.09.06
Categories & Tags: BioServe Space Technologies,Brookhaven National Laboratory,Grant,International Space Station,NASA,New Publication,Politics,Russian Space Agency,Space Shuttle
Comments: 1
We’ve been pretty busy in the lab lately. We had yet another publication appear in PubMed, sent off multiple publications to journals for review, and ran a couple of big experiments. On top of that, I moved to a new house, so I’ve been less than useful in the lab for the last couple of months.
The publication in PubMed is from one of our earlier studies investigating the effects of radiation on the ability to respond to an immune challenge. In this case, it was a secondary challenge – meaning, we challenged the mice twice. Once immediately after irradiation. And once several weeks later. In essence, we were checking to see if radiation altered the development of basic immune memory. Here’s the abstract:
Where have all the radiobiology bloggers gone?
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2008.06.19
Categories & Tags: Bacteria,Department of Energy,Grant,Immunity,Low Dose Radiation,Radiation
Comments: None
Lately, I’ve been a bit busy with a few things. Mostly writing grants for DOE (due June 25) and NIH (due July 15), and working with Farnaz to get the first space shuttle paper out (we sent it out to our co-authors for their input earlier today). Not to mention a couple of graduation ceremonies and a dissertation defense. Needless to say, this means I haven’t been as productive here as I’d like. So, since I had to write a summary statement for my DOE grant, I thought I’d post it here as well.
Theoretically, it’s supposed to be written for the layperson. But, as you’ll see, some of it ain’t. Unfortunately, I was limited to one page of text, and there were requirements on what I had to include (like hypothesis and specific aims), so I couldn’t go into a lot of detail. The actual grant proposal is 15 pages long. And trust me, you have no idea how hard it is to keep a proposal that short until you’re forced to do it. 
