I've got two letters of recommendation to write and I've got to go over Melissa's U01 grant, so OF COURSE IT'S TIME TO UPDATE THE LANGLAIS LAB'S WEBSITE!
Hello world, it's me again, writing to you from the heart of science, with a message GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN! Lots of Langlais Lab updates, last Spring saw the graduation of Anay, Mac, and Noah, all off to bigger and better not as great as the Langlais Lab so whatever things. Those guys, who needs them, when we can recruit Alana, Anna, Emilie, Eva, Jake2, and Rotimi BEAT IT MAC, ANAY, AND NOAH! All the new recruits are undergraduates, with the exception of Emilie, the rare Langlais Lab Master's student recruit, that's fun. This coming Spring will see even more losses, as Jake1, Kaelie Z, Madison G, and Rotimus will all be graduating, all of them trying to get into medical school. Still can't get any of these turds to turn to the PhD side LIKE MY HOMEGIRL SKYLAR BATTY who is in year 2 of her PhD at UCSD. Atley made it to medical school as well, over at Midwestern up in Phoenix.
So, onto what's important, the Langlais Lab research program. Yeah, so, about that. We lost all of Spring 2023 to contamination. I am not kidding. From December 2022 to May 2023, every single 3T3-L1 6-well plate undergoing differentiation got contaminated. I personally spent every week trying to figure it out, changing each single aspect, and in the end, do you know what it was? The tissue culture room itself. We switched over to Larry's TC room and everything returned to normal. So, screw the Langlais Lab TC, we're done with that dump.
Publications have been sparse, yeah the proteomics lab has definitely pumped out a lot of co-authorships for myself, and a lot of the grants that collaborators have asked me to be co-I on have hit, but the Langlais Lab itself has been battling this so-called War of Atrition. I completely pivoted from microtubules in insulin action, opting instead to build a screening system for candidate proteins involved in insulin-stimulated glucose uptake. During the training of all the new students over the past 18 months or whatever, a new system evolved, a new team-based approach for undergraduate immersion in research. Thought it was so cool I decided to pursue it as a proposal, the "Team-Based Undergraduate Biomedical Research Initiative", so, we'll see how that does. Also came up with an interesting spatial proteomics grant that we sent in to the Arizona Biomedical Research Commission, we'll see, i'm not exactly the best at getting funded. Blah. I got a start-up when I showed up in October of 2016, it wasn't much, but I'm obsessed with managing money, and I've managed to stretch that baby to this very day, but, I only have a little left. Just gotta survive the last of this extremely dark and scary abyss that is the current Langlais Lab low ebb. Can't say I've ever been in this situation before, it's a career crossroads, this job man....it's a trip.
Larry (my boss) says he's on the way out, the old glide path to retirement, sad to see him leave, if he actually does, cause I swear that dude is going to work until he's one million, i mean, he's already something like 100 or 74. I want him to retire, but, I'm also ok with him running a few more victory laps, need to ride those coattails until I bleed his last drop. We've had such a good run for so long together, just don't want to see it stop.
So, there's your report, there are so many balls in the air right now, funny to think i've been doing this for over 25 years. Oh, and I got tenure. Ain't fired yet.