Back in Boston

What a week. I spent half of it at University of Montreal's IRIC, or Institut de recherche en immunologie et en cancerologie. I was truly impressed.

This new center was the brain child of half a dozen University of Montreal professors. They wanted to build a state of the art facility to tackle cancer and immune disease. Within a few years they received a ton of money from several sources and had built the main edifice. Today the institute has 22 labs, many of which are headed by young investigators who are performing outstanding work.

Click here for a movie clip of the interior.

Highlights from the movie: For those in the know, the woman in pink is Julie Lessard. She's done incredible work looking at chromatin remodeling factors in the Brain. The woman in white at 0:31 is Amy Maddox who discovered that Rho is activated upon entry to Mitosis. Active Rho helps to stimulate contraction and allows the cell to round up just before the mitotic spindle is assembled. She now studies anillins, a family of membrane associated proteins that contribute to cytokinesis. Her husband, Paul Maddox is also at IRIC. He's done incredible work on kinetochore and mitotic spindle assembly. Finally the guy on the phone at the end of the movie is Philippe Roux, an ex-neighbour of mine here at Harvard Medical School. His lab studies TOR signalling, a critical intracellular signaling cascade that regulates cell size and cell division in response to both growth factors and nutrient availability. To read more on TOR see this post.

As for my talk, I think it went very well. I received plenty of positive vibes from those who listened (thanks Keith!) Inaddition the other talks were excellent. I especially liked Eric Lecuyer's talk on mRNA localization in embryoes. There were also some very provocative talks by Mike Tyres and Lea Harrington (who gave her seminar wearing a Canadiens Hockey Jersey - too bad it didn't help!) Did you hear that they are moving to the University of Edinburgh? If I have time, I'll delve into the concepts advanced in each of these two talks.

Speaking of posting, hopefully now that all the craziness is over I'll have a chance to update my blog more frequently. I also received an email from Corie Lok about tomorrow's Nature Pub Night at the Squealing Pig. I'll post the details later today.