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Speed Dating for Science

31 IGSP faculty members, 90 seconds and one super-soaker

Mohamed Noor readies to fire a super soaker at the IGSP Faculty Research at a Glance.

They called it "Faculty Research at a Glance," but "At a Dead Run" might have been a better description.

As part of the annual "Explorations Week," to introduce faculty, post-docs, students and staff to the Institute for Genomes Sciences & Policy, IGSP faculty and affiliates were invited to describe their work in just 90 seconds to an auditorium full of people, or suffer the soggy consequences.

Master of Ceremonies and biology professor Mohamed Noor, and his hired guns, stood by to blast anyone who ran long with a super-soaker water gun.

Responses to the challenge varied widely, from talking real fast to reducing ideas to Haiku poetry, as members of Dave McApline's lab chose to do. Uwe Ohler sang an a cappella ode to computational biology. Nina Sherwood and three students rapped, sort of, about the nervous system of the fruitfly. Phil Febbo blew up a balloon representing conventional wisdom about prostate cancer, and then burst it with the key to a conference room.

Besides just being fun, the first-of-a-kind speed-dating session had serious aims, explained Tomalei Vess, associate director for education, training and academic development at IGSP.

"We wanted to help the community get a general overview of what was happening in the IGSP in a kind of digestible, sound-bite format," Vess said. "And we wanted to give students who might be thinking about genome science and its impact an opportunity to hear the faculty and what sorts of things get them jazzed."

Somewhat surprisingly, most of the 31 faculty who chose to try their hand at it were able to do their shtick in less than the allotted 90 seconds. (There were, of course, some soggy exceptions.)

The "at a glance" session and the reception afterward that allowed students to connect with faculty were enough of a success that IGSP plans to do it again next year, Vess said.

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Phil Febbo blows up conventional wisdom on prostate cancer.