Başak and Erdem passed their quals! We celebrated our new PhD candidates with cake.
Hande presented her project “Ciliopathy-linked Protein CCDC66 regulates diverse microtubules arrays and ingression furrow formation during cell division” during the Science Fair in our college, Koç University.
During the Science Fair two other members, Efe and Ezgi also exhibited their imaging data on cilia.
Congratulations to four of our PhD students Hande, İrem, Altar, and Şeyma for your TÜBİTAK BIDEB PhD fellowships!
We attended the Sabri Ülker Symposium on Metabolism and Life as a lab. We listened to the great research topics of scientists, including “Rising Star” candidate Turkish scientists, and Nobel award winner Randy Schekman. It was a very enlightening symposium, and a nice throwback to the time Elif won the Sabri Ülker Award in 2021.
We had a lab outing to celebrate Umut Batman’s visit from Geneva and acceptance of his first-author paper in PLOS Biology. Our celebration involved indulging into almost 2 kgs of gelato.
The last year has been challenging at all levels and all of us has been stressed about moving our projects forward with the COVID19-related restrictions. We had a lab motivation day for managing the stress and bonding with the new lab members. Our day off included visits to restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops etc…
We got together with KUYBIM group to celebrate the recent funding and publications from our lab! (Due to COVID19 restrictions, we can only get part of the labs and the food in the pictures.)
Since we cannot organize our annual new year’s departmental party due to COVID19, Elif prepared a cookie basket, which had 15 different types of cookies. Based on reviewer comment (twitter community), the following picture will be revised by adding a scale bar and changing the font.
Melis visited Guichard and Hamel lab at the University of Geneva in January to learn expansion microscopy. She finally optimized the protocols in our lab and generated really cool data on her project. All of us were really excited about the prospects of this new method for different projects.
Elif’s sons have been helping us with filling the tip boxes in the lab. Good job Mert, Mehmet and Kerem!
We celebrated Deniz’s graduation and Academic Excellence Award. First lab gathering since the COVID19 pandemic.
We celebrated the EMBO YIP award with a small culinary tour of Istanbul and a nice walk along Bosphorus. Here is one picture form the culinary tour, that includes one of the best breakfast menus in Istanbul.
It was very productive 2 days in Organalle Biogenesis and Function in Cell Physiology and in Disease Conference with Tim Stearns, Ketan J. Patel, Fanni Gergely, David Mick and many other invited speakers.
Lab is growing with an enormous pace and we might not all fit to our house next time. Once again, we had great food at the new years party, where everybody showed their skills in baking and cooking. We also had a lot of funat the white elephant game, mostly due to the impatient boys of mine at the age of 9, 7 and 2. They just cannot wait to open the presents. We are all already looking forward to the next one.
From the lunch to host Yin Loon Lee, former grad student of Stearns Lab and current postdoc in Brian Burkes lab.
Celebrating the EMBO grant in Set Balik