The devil is in the details

:)

Things have slowly been getting back to normal (and back to positivity) here. I've felt much better today than I had in past days. And then it got even better. :)

One really major problem that I've been having lately has involved my role in the lab. We currently have 10 graduate students in the lab and somehow it works out that I am one of the most senior (I know, I know, I'm sure I've complained about this before.) I don't feel like I'm old enough (as a fourth year) to be a senior-ish graduate student, but here I am. As a result, I spend a relatively large portion of my time helping out other people on their experiments, which often has the unfortunate effect of leaving my own work (you know, the stuff that I have to accomplish to be allowed to graduate) to stagnate. Due to both the increasing abilities of the other students and my increasing irritability when asked for portions of my time, my work with other people has diminished to the point where I am really only helping one person with any sort of regularity right now. While that is also likely to diminish greatly soon-ish, it is really a story in and of itself. More recently, I have also become the lab statistician. I didn't take a TON of statistics as an undergraduate, but I took more than the average biology student and certainly MUCH more than most of the people in my lab. I can use some complicated software and do some complicated tests and generally understand the use of different tests/what I'm doing, but a real statistician I am not. In any case, my advisor has been taking a lot of advantage of my understanding of statistics for various projects around the lab (again, not the stuff that I have to accomplish for a PhD.)

In particular, I have been working on statistics for one vaccine study. Without going into detail, it's an important HIV vaccine study. Anyway, I've been involved in all sorts of seemigly mindless meetings over the past month or so and have been asked to do all sorts of modeling and testing parameters for lots of parts of the study. I've generally regarded the whole thing as a giant time sink, but I've gone along with it because it is obviously an important study and it needed to get done. My advisor has enjoyed waxing philosophically to me about the profound implications of the whole thing many, many times and I have to admit that he's only overstating the case a little.

Anyway, today I finished it all up, saw what the data said, ran and excitedly found my collaborators in the lab and went to the boss. It was exactly what he had hoped for. Exactly. He got on his knees in the middle of his office and bowed down to us. He looked at me and said "You didn't just take lemons and make lemonade. You took lemons and made champagne!!" I am now making the figures for the paper, which he is dropping everything to write and which we are sending to Science (the biggest journal). It looks like I might just end up being an author on a Science paper. Maybe. If we're lucky. But either way, this is all really exciting and it is a very nice feeling to know that I had a small bit of impact on some work that will likely heavily influence HIV vaccine research.

Today is a very good day.

posted by Immunegirl @ 3:12 PM