Sunday, November 15, 2015

Pathway to a Better Electronic Notebook: A Markdown Experience

Scientists are relying more and more on electronic
lab notebooks.
One of the exciting parts of starting in a new lab is the chance to start establishing some better lab practices. As I wrote a few months ago, I was gaining a lot of traction using Microsoft OneNote as an electronic notebook. I liked it, but after a lot of use, I found it was not meeting my needs for customization, formatting, and most importantly, version control. As I started in the new lab, I decided to drop the ol' OneNote notebook and try out markdown on GitHub, as is used in my new lab. Ultimately I found markdown to be much more functional than OneNote. This week I want to share this experience so that you can try it out too.

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Pathway to the Doctorate: A Brief Reflection on Grad School

Elizabeth and myself celebrating after the defense.
Last week I took some time to talk about our lab's most recent manuscript about the skin virome. This has been an exciting paper and it gained a lot of traction in the press. This week I want to go back and reflect on another exciting event from the last month, which was my PhD thesis defense at Penn. You can think of this as the "PhD graduation".