Ryan Quiroz

Greetings from Boston, Massachusetts and the famous Harvard University. This is Ryan Quiroz, and I am spending my summer research experience in Boston as part of the HHMI EXROP program. I am living in the Harvard dorms in Harvard Square, but I actually work right across the street from MIT at the Broad Institute. It is a unique mixture of Harvard and MIT professors, as well as some collaborators from the many surrounding hospitals, in a part-industry part-academic lab environment. The institute was created by my P.I., Stuart Schreiber, in partnership with Eric Lander, one of the driving forces in the Human Genome project. The institute is funded by the Broad family, humanitarians from Los Angeles, who actually have a building named after them at UCLA, the Broad Stem Cell Research building.


I work in the chemical biology platform at the Broad, and my project is concerned with the chemical synthesis of analogues of a compound that exhibited potent and selective activity against multiple myeloma cancer cells compared to wild type blood progenitors. Using the high-throughput screening technology available at the Broad, this parent compound was identified out of a 25,000 compound library, and my goal is to make structurally and chemically similar probe molecules that exhibit better water solubility and enhanced selectivity in killing multiple myeloma cells. To do this, I am currently working on heterocycle and coupling chemistry, as well as learning how to run high throughput cytotoxicity assays and RT-PCR to comprehensively analyze my compounds. The 8 weeks I have been here so far have been great, and I have been learning so much.

Boston itself has been a great city. Although it has quite a different feel (and climate) from the west coast, I love the Charles River running through Cambridge and Boston, the beautiful bridges, and the quaint skyline. I have been kayaking, site seeing, and exploring in Cambridge and Boston, and it has been a lot of fun seeing all of the historical landmarks and enjoying these old but prestigious towns. There is also not a lot of chain restaurants or major highways in this city, so it has been a great new experience walking all over town and trying many different local eateries.

Harvard is about to start school again, so I will actually be moving out of the dorms and into a hotel near the medical school very soon, and hopefully that will be another new area of town to explore. I hope everyone else is doing well and I will see all of you again in the fall.

Martin Mwangi

My name is Martin Mwangi and I have been spending my 2011 summer at the amazing University of Pittsburgh as a part of the HHMI EXROP program. I’ve been enjoying working in the Hatfull lab studying mycobacteriophages under the supervision of Dr. Bekah Dedrick. My project involves analyzing the expression of a putative DNA methylase in several mycobacteriophages(which also putatively encodes an endonuclease in a different frame) in both Mycobacterium smegmatis and E. Coli. I have already learned a couple of news techniques such as cloning.

The lab I am working is considerably larger than at my home institution which has been great as there are plenty of people to ask questions. In lab meeting, where I presented this past week, their questions and feedback was very helpful in thinking about how to best approach my project. All the people are very friendly and I had the opportunity of enjoying a potluck at the lab coordinators house this past weekend.

Getting to see the city of Pittsburgh has been pretty amazing. I had the opportunity to see all the amazing fireworks shows across the city of Pittsburgh on the 4th of July. This weekend I hope to go Kayaking. Overall my stay so far has been great and I look forward to what the next 5 weeks have to offer.