Popular AI Suggestions

 It seems that ChatGPT likes what we do in the Wright lab so much, that we corner a third of the suggestions on sequence alignment! You can find DECIPHER here. 

Lab Photo 2023-2024

Erik, Nick, Sam (seated), Shu-Ting (standing behind them), Shania and Nishant (center), Aidan (behind), Monica (not shown, because someone has to take the picture). 

The above picture was taken in early October, which if you're familiar with the weather patterns of Pittsburgh, is unique because it was not raining and it was warm. It's possible that this day will be the last nice day of the year. We are also lucky because the building the lab is in, sits right on the river with a small grove of trees next to it. You can just make out a bridge (the Birmingham) and some of the buildings from downtown in the background. These things gave us a great opportunity to take an autumn lab photograph. 

Having lab pictures provides an opportunity to track who was in the lab when. Because students come and go, we can sometimes forget who knows who, and how long students were overlapping with other students and staff. It's a chance to have a visual reminder of the groups and how they worked together. This picture will likely get used on acknowledgement slides for the next year, and serve as the visual representation of the lab during the 2023-2024 academic year. 

Summer 2023 Lab Outing

After much jockeying for a date, the students went for a lab outing that involved bowling, karaoke, and a slide! Much fun was had at Pins in South Side Works. 

 
Many congratulations to Shu-Ting and Aidan for winning their respective bowling groups.

Many requests were made to get video of Nishant going down the slide, but only this picture survived the evening. 
Thanks to the group (and their partners) for a great time. I'm sure everyone can't wait for the next outing. 

Department of Biomedical Informatics 2023 Retreat

The Wright Lab attended the Department of Biomedical Informatics yearly retreat on August 24, 2023.

This year's retreat featured Dr. Brian Chapman and Dr. Wendy Chapman, giving their talks "The Informatics Rebellion and the Patient Experience", and "Addressing the Translational Gap for Digital Health Innovation: An Australian Experience", respectively. Both of which were well recieved.

Representing the Wright Lab, Aidan Lakshman, presented his poster "ProtWeaver: Gene Functional Inference at Scale". Congratulations Aidan for doing such a great job!

NewGrant

Congratulations to the lab for receiving its first purely bioinformatics grant from the NIH! The new three year grant ("Connecting the universe of proteins to address annotation inequality in the microbial proteome") will develop tools for exploring microbial genomes. Read more here.

Getting to know the Wright Lab Members: Aidan

Getting to know the Wright Lab Members: Aidan

Presenting a semi-regular feature that we will use to highlight the most recent academic achievements and answer some questions about the lab member. 

This month's featured member for July 2023 is Aidan Lakshman, a doctoral student in the lab. 

Q1: What was your most recent academic achievement? 
A1: I presented my work on the ProtWeaver algorithm at Evolution 2023 in Albuquerque, NM. 

Q2: What would be your dream country to visit? 

A2: Australia or New Zealand

Q3: If you could master one instrument, which would it be? 

A3: Bass Guitar!

Q4: What is your go-to for having a good laugh? 

A4: New Girl

Q5: What is your favorite board game? 

A5: Backgammon

Q6: What is your favorite app?

A6: Reddit

New Publication: Reporting on Antibiotic Resistance.

We are pleased to announce a new publication from the lab: "Evaluating the long-term portrayal of antibiotic resistance in major U.S. newspapers." in BMC Public Health. Congratulations to the authors!

To support this publication, we have created an infographic with the major conclusions drawn from this work.