What are some of the cool things happening in our lab?

Despite a few efforts to get others to write in this space, my face from that CNN.com article is still at the top of the page a month and a half later. So I decided to share some of the cool things happening in the lab right now as a way to bump it down and highlight the hard work of my students and colleagues.

Dana Ahern and Antoine Dejong are both becoming mouse experts: they are working on my collaboration with Dr. Gregory Freund, Head of Pathology here at Illinois, looking at behavioral effects of progesterone.

Sophia Bodnar and Emily Marzolph, with Laura Klein, are starting to get together the resources we will need to run a large study in the spring to look at differences in circulating and excreted C-reactive protein.

Theresa Emmerling and Ashley Higgins, both graduates of LEE but still members of our lab group, have been working with me to develop a project to collect narratives from women about their experiences with hormonal contraceptives.

Mark Grabowski is RAing for me this semester and has been plugging away at the University of Saskatchewan collaboration analyses. He has been using some statistical methods with which I am completely unfamiliar, so I am glad to be learning a lot from him. He has already begun to find some very interesting relationships between C-peptide and endometrial thickness -- stay tuned as we figure out more!

Laura Klein is working away at graduate school and NSF GRF applications. Of course, she is also starting to get together the materials necessary for our study of cortisol, stress, and sonography. We are re-running some samples from my dissertation to see if cortisol is elevated on the days women had transvaginal ultrasounds, to test the assumption that these ultrasound are stressful.

Talia Melber is working on grant applications and her dissertation proposal. She is also looking at some archived data to see if she can come up with a useful proxy for hormones she is interested in.

Katie Tribble is experiencing a minor setback with a broken wrist, but will soon be able to run some tests on blood spots to make sure that medium will work with our assay kits. She is also applying to med school. For anyone reading: this is a young woman you would be lucky to have as a doctor!

Ashley Voigt has been doing some great work curating my current project files. She is also applying to pharmacy school and has been getting acceptances and interviews galore.