GeneDig Video

May 12, 2025

Here is our new GeneDig video: GeneDig: Democratizing access to genomics (also on Vimeo).

Videos

May 12, 2025

Below is a video made by SimpliSci.org describing one of our papers.

Here is a clip of me describing some of the work that we do in the lab.

Get the most out of your money for your university education

May 12, 2025

Class lectures. I like giving them, but every year I know students do not learn the material very well. All professors know this, hundreds of years of history have shown this, and a huge body of evidence suggests that other approaches are much more effective than lecture-and-drill-based techniques (Waldrop, 2013, Nature).

I do not think I have a monopoly on hidden, specific knowledge that only by going to my class will you be able to learn. I do not think I am the best lecturer in the world, and I absolutely believe there are other people out there who can lecture better than I can. With all of the world's information at our fingertips in the form of online articles, books, audio, video, and forums, students now have the option of learning anything they want, very easily. So what are they paying money for in their college education? Here is what I think students should be paying for:

  1. The college experience (extending their education and broadening their horizons).
  2. To lead a more examined life (learning how to think critically).
  3. Access to their like-minded peers.
  4. Access to professors.
  5. Access to research.
  6. The diploma.

The individual student knows best what type of learner they are. The progression of novel technology to enhance education seems to be: books, then audio, then video, then artificial intelligence. Thus, from now on I am going to upload videos of all of my lectures, with the lecture slides freely available beforehand for my students. Class time will then be used only for small-group discussions of material the students will (hopefully) have already prepared for.

There should never be a monopoly on knowledge (shout out to GeneDig); what you should pay money for are the things that pure knowledge cannot provide.

Thanks GeneDig

May 12, 2025

I was curious about trinucleotide repeat disorders like Huntington's disease, and where the trinucleotide repeats occurred in the Huntingtin RNA: near the beginning, middle, or end? I first tried looking up the huntingtin gene (HTT) in NCBI and realized this was going to take a while. Then I realized that even the normal HTT gene should have a few trinucleotide repeats, so I looked up HTT using GeneDig and found the CAGCAGCAG repeats immediately.

I then repeated this for the other trinucleotide repeat disorders and even found whether the repeats were in the untranslated region of the RNA or not. Sweet. GeneDig.

A Proposal for New Investigators

May 12, 2025

It is exciting being a new investigator. Here is a proposal I have for other new investigators:

As a new principal investigator (PI), I encourage other new PIs to hire underprivileged youths from high school as lab assistants in their new lab.

Typically, when you are a new investigator you spend most of your time setting up your new lab, you are young with fewer personal obligations, you spend a lot of time mentoring your first hire anyway, and you do a lot of menial tasks that you want done right. So give a kid a chance to earn it. Compared to a normal technician:

  1. They are cheaper – win for you.
  2. They are very eager – win for you.
  3. They are willing to work hard and earn it – win for you.
  4. You get a technician you personally trained from the ground up – win for you.
  5. They get a full-time job that fulfills financial needs that may be holding them back – win for them.
  6. They get a highly trained professor devoting full attention to mentoring them – ridiculous win for them.
  7. They get rewarding employment at a university while educating themselves and generating real-world skills – win for them.
  8. They get first-hand experience in research, the best teaching tool to learn science – win for them.
  9. They will eventually get a reference letter from you, opening many more doors – win for them.
  10. You set a good example – win for everybody.
  11. Science communication is a skill you need to work on – win for you and for science.
  12. Give back to your community and teach a local from the general public – win for everybody.
  13. You are giving them a chance they normally would not have – win for them.

One thing to be clear about: you have to be confident that you can pick good people, you should have reasonably high standards, and you should not be afraid to interview a lot of people. I have done it, and it is definitely a win-win for everybody. Full disclosure: I was a high-school dropout with no GED. Pay it forward.

Congrats to my students!

May 10, 2025

Kudos to my two trainees, Chiu-An Lo and Ibrahim Kays, who were awarded a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Brain Star award for 2016! A well-deserved prize for them; they worked super hard on this project over the years. Their science game is strong. With Vedrana Cvetkovska winning in 2013, I now have a 100% hit rate for my graduate students winning this CIHR award!