Author: Sarah Foust

  • Pets of Tri-I, Pet Sematary 3: Mr. Inky Rises

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    This fall I had the pleasure of interviewing Sir S. T. Inkerton, also known as Mr. Inky. He is an intimidatingly independent kitty with a soft spot for his owner, Yagmur Konuk, a research assistant in the de Lange lab at Rockefeller. Mr. Inky was rescued from St. Michael’s Cemetery in June and has since…

  • NYC Study Spots To Explore!

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    New York City is a behemoth of a city to tour for any amount of time, so moving and living in the city for the first time is simultaneously exciting and overwhelming. The amazing skyscrapers, bustling traffic, the chaos of Times Square, the fast New Yorker walking pace, and a massive park in the middle…

  • First-Year Exploration

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    My life in New York City began on August 26th at two points on York Avenue: the Faculty House and the Zuckerman Research Center at MSK. There, I joined Dr. Christina Leslie for my first rotation. In her lab, I have been working on methodologies to process  exciting spatial transcriptomics datasets. This data modality provides…

  • Introducing the multitalented Jazz Weisman

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    Jazz Weisman’s desk is in the far-right corner of Gaby Maimon’s lab at Rockefeller University, located on the third floor of Flexner Hall. You can recognize his desk based on the myriad of seemingly unrelated items on display: a series of intricate circuit boards and half-assembled custom electronics, a 3D-printed iPhone charging station, a cheat…

  • Interview with Hsuan-An Chen

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    Hsuan-an (Sean) Chen is a joint postdoctoral researcher at Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is currently working in the Charles M. Rice Lab, a lab focusing on virology and infectious disease, at Rockefeller University. He provides an expert cancer biology perspective on the pathology caused by the chronic Hepatitis C Virus…

  • An underprepared graduate student’s guide to meeting with your advisor

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    Meeting with your grad school advisor is a stressful situation at the best of times. It can be anxiety-inducing even when we have spent the week preparing, have slides lined up, and are caught up with all the latest papers. But, often, it’s not the best of times. Often, it is the worst of times:…

  • ChatGPT is Changing the Way We Do Science

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    I started relying on ChatGPT in 2022, when my PI bought a premium account for the lab. I had used the free version in the past, but for $20 a month we gained early access to the latest models and never had to wait for server availability. It didn’t take very long for me to…

  • Foundation Models in Medicine: Revolution or Hype?

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    The allure of foundation models in medicine is undeniable. Foundation models are large-scale machine learning models trained on broad data at scale and designed to be adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. In natural language processing and computer vision, they’ve demonstrated remarkable capabilities. GPT-4, for instance, can generate human-like text responses, and models…

  • The Moment I Became a Scientist Was When I Realized That I Should Stay at the Table

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    I was born and raised in a remote small town in southwest China where transportation was inaccessible, and the economy was underdeveloped. People made a living by planting rice and corn or working as migrant laborers. My hometown of Baiquan, situated on a plateau, was surrounded by towering mountains with no end in sight. From…

  • Avery-McCarty-McLeod experiments: The 80th anniversary of identifying DNA as the molecular basis of heredity

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    The simple but bold 68th Street entrance to the Rockefeller campus was erected in honor of the man who in many ways embodies the scientific and social spirit of the institute. The inscription on one of the piers guarding the entrance reads, and is a homage to the seminal work done over many decades by…