Bowling Night

Originally posted 2015/01/29

It turns out that we're still not very good at physics.

More on Peer Review, but talking about grants this time

Originally posted 2015/01/13

Edit (January 21, 2015) - At the end of a very long day of reviewing applications, we were each handed a hand-written and framed note from someone who has the most to gain from our efforts. Thank you Jennifer for the encouragement! I hope that we are an encouragement to you too.

Next week Steve is heading to Toronto to review studentship and post doctoral fellowship applications for the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada. Funding, through operating grants, trainee awards, and other types of grants, is what keeps labs running. We are almost completely dependent on competitive research grants, just as pretty much all research groups at a university or research institute are. However, not every, or even most grant applications are funded. In fact, in recent funding rounds at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Canada’s largest government funding body for medical research, fewer than 15% of applications were successful.

Peer review is central to the process of deciding which grants are funded and which are not. Check out this post from Dr. Karin Lee (here), the Vice President Research of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, for a really good longer-form description of how peer review works and why it’s important. Briefly, each application is reviewed in detail by at least two experts in the field who are qualified to evaluate its merits and feasibility. Operating grant applications in particular can be very detailed, and it takes a lot of time to do a thorough review. After the individual reviews are complete, members of the panel meet and discuss each application, ultimately deciding on whether to recommend funding or not. There are always more fundable applications than there is money (see the above very low funding rate), and therefore each grant is given a score with the award (usually) going to the top few. The review panel only makes recommendations; the funding agency makes the final decisions as to where the money goes.

“Peers” are central to the process of “Peer Review”. You need to be an expert to properly evaluate a complex scientific application, and the best-qualified experts are other active scientists in the field. It’s a lot of work to be on a review panel and you're almost never paid. It's an important part of the process though, and well all depend on high quality review, so scientists (usually) take the job very seriously. That doesn’t stop us from complaining when our own applications aren’t successful which, these days, is more often than not.

Wish us luck!

Amy's paper accepted for publication! Excitement in the KerfootLab and a chance to talk about peer review

Originally posted 2014/12/14

A while ago, Amy submitted a paper for publication. This week we finally got the good news that it has been accepted at the Journal of Neuroimmunology!

We’ll post more about what the paper actually says once its been officially published, but for now we’re happy to celebrate our first research paper generated 100% within our lab. We’re expecting to submit several more soon, but it’s good to get the ball rolling and momentum on our side.

Fig 1: The KerfootLab celebrating Amy's success! We're all about different types of imaging and Amy brought her hipster Polaroid camera. Of course, to share the resulting picture we had to subsequently image it with an iPhone, so it loses some of its cool factor.

As you can see from our original post, we submitted the manuscript over 3 months ago. Since then, the journal sent it to two other scientists who have relevant expertise to get their opinions on the paper. This “peer review” is an important part of the modern scientific process. In part, it guards against the publication of bad science, but it is also a chance to hear from colleagues who may have different perspectives and might see something in our results that we didn’t.

There are many arguments for and against peer review that you can find on the Internet (too many to link to here), but for the most part we think that is valuable. Discussion of the merits of a paper doesn’t end with the publication, however, and the real test is whether or not anyone reads it and if it influences the field as a whole. It takes a couple of years to see that. If you’re interested, sites like Google Scholar track citations of individual papers and you can see what influence they have had.

Fig 2: A somewhat self-serving example of how to look up citations on Google Scholar: Search for a paper (by author name for example) and click on the "cited by" link underneath the paper (red arrow). Alternatively, you can look at papers from a given investigator by clicking on their profile (green arrow, top of page).

The reviewers that got our paper were generally positive, but asked for some additional clarifications of how we interpreted our results and asked us to perform an additional experiment to address a relevant research question that our original manuscript left unanswered. This is very typical of manuscript reviews. Sometimes, however, things can get a little mean.

We did the work to address the reviewer’s concerns and resubmitted the manuscript about a month ago. The reviewers then had a chance to look at our response and ultimately the journal accepted the paper. We don’t know exactly when it will be published officially, but we’ll post a summary when it is. After that, while we'll try to deny it, we'll be obsessively tracking its progress through Google Scholar.

Our very own science outreach week

Originally posted 2014/11/20

There is a lot of good (and not so good) science communication available on the web these days, but we think that it’s a particularly good idea for us to get out of the lab and explain what we’re up to ourselves. An opportunity to talk to real live people, rather than through a computer, is rare and so this was a big week for us with not one, but two public outreach events!

On Sunday Steve participated in Western University’s 2014 Fall Preview Day by delivering a Mock Lecture to prospective students and their parents. They learned about how the immune system decides what to attack and how you become immune to an infectious disease. We’re looking forward to seeing these students in our Microbiology and Immunology courses in a couple of years.

an MSologist

Last night (Wednesday) Steve participated in “Ask and MSologist Night” organized by Multiple Sclerosis Western, a student-run organization for those interested in learning about MS and supporting MS research. Along with a neurologist from the London MS clinic, we had an interesting discussion about what we do and don’t know about MS and its cause(s). KerfootLab members were there in support!

We’re always looking for ways to talk to non-scientists about immunology and our research. Hopefully we’ll be able participate in more events like this in the near future, but in the mean time, let us know if there’s anything that you’d like to read about on this site.

Artifact Photobomb!

Originally posted 2014/11/14

We use a lot of different microscopes in our research. In later posts, we’ll introduce our microscopes and how we use them in our experiments. As anyone who spends time on the Internet knows, in addition to being informative, microscope images can also be amazingly beautiful. All of the images that we post on our lab site are taken using our own microscopes, and we’ll continue to pass on and explain the especially striking ones.

As with any photographer, we don’t always get the shot we’re look looking for.

The nemesis of any microscopist is the dreaded “Artifact”; a speck of dust, blob junk, fold or tear in the tissue section, or some other feature that’s only there because something went wrong with preparing the sample. We work hard to minimize artifacts and control for them in our experiments so that they don’t interfere with our interpretation of the results.

So it's no surprise that we don't normally like artifacts, but sometimes they can provide some entertainment. Case in point:

(photo credit Rajiv Jain)

Cells in culture sometimes behave oddly and can have more than one nuclei (in orange here). These particular nuclei look terribly offended that an artifact (bright glowing orange spot - it's not supposed to be there) has ruined their selfie.
 

9th Annual IIRF Meeting

Originally posted 2014/11/14

We were at the Infection & Immunity Research Forum (IIRF) 2014 yesterday. Every year, the students of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology organize this excellent research meeting. Attendees from Western and other local universities have the chance to present their research, exchange ideas, discuss their future career plans, and hear a presentation from a world-leading researcher. This year, the students hosted Dr. Ronald Germain from the National Institutes of Health.

Rajiv presented his plans for his PhD project and got some good feedback from fellow students and faculty.

Amy represents KerfootLab at the MSSOC Celebration of Champions

Originally posted 2014/10/30

Amy was in Toronto last Friday (October 24, 2014) for the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada’s Celebration of Champions, an event held in each fall to honor top fundraisers from MS Bike events in Ontario. We posted previously about our participation in this year’s Grand Bend to London event, and Amy was invited to the Celebration of Champions to represent researchers funded by the MSSOC.

Amy had the chance to tell attendees about how MSSOC programs, like the endMS Summer School (described here), have impacted her training as an MSc student and influenced her ongoing interest in MS, as well as how funding from the MSSOC has allowed us to discover new things about the B cells that contribute to autoimmune disease and destruction of myelin in the brain.

Thank you again to all supporters of the MS Bike and other MSSOC events! A lot of the excellent MS research currently performed in Canada would not happen without your efforts.

KerfootLab is not very good at gravity

Originally posted 2014/10/09

The new department chair issued a Kinetic Energy Challenge, where labs competed to construct vehicles to travel the length of the sloped bridge between the SDRI and DSB buildings. Our attempt at building a hovercraft out of cardboard, autoclave bags, and air duster canisters failed miserably and KerfootLab got owned, big time.

Congratulations to ArtsLab and DikeakosLab for constructing the only vehicles that made it any real distance.

Meet the Prof Day

Originally posted 2014/09/14

Steve met a bunch of very keen first year students and told them about awesome Immunology (and microbiology) is and encouraged them to enrole in MicroImm courses next year.

Amy submits a manuscript

Originally posted 2014/09/02

Here is Amy pressing "Submit" on her research manuscript describing her work developing a new MOG fusion protein antigen and characterizing the immune response and autoimmune disease that it elicits.

Now she gets to wait to hear back from the reviewers.