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  • Gratitude (50 Things I’m Grateful For)
    2024 so far has been nuts. In 2024, my fiancé (never going to get tired of that word—fiancé!) Cory and I bought our house, we got engaged (after almost 13 years!), and we adopted the newest member of our family (who chose us!), our perfect tuxedo cat Winston. I left my lab of nearly a decade and started a new job. And I finished the first ever draft of my first ever novel….
  • Advice for Grad School
    Go to grad school because you want to be in grad school. Don’t go to grad school if it’s something to endure in order to get to the next step. If the next step requires grad school then the next step is probably like grad school, so if you don’t enjoy grad school then you are at serious risk of not enjoying the next step….
  • Totality in Millinocket, Maine
    My partner Cory and his high school friend Robert and I roadtripped to Bangor, Maine, to see totality in Millinocket, Maine. In total we drove (well, Robert drove; I worked in the back of the car and Cory played Mario and Rabbids) 12 hours, including four there, four back, and four in traffic from Millinocket back to Bangor….
  • My Experience in the Novavax (Nuvaxovid/Covovax) COVID-19 Vaccine Phase 3 Trial
    Being in the Novavax trial was probably the most meaningful thing I did during the pandemic, especially early in the pandemic, and possibly one of the most impactful things I will end up doing in my lifetime. It gave me purpose at a time when I felt like the news was happening to me and there was nothing I could do about it, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself and my loved ones and the city around me from being washed into the course of history….
  • A Fish Named Ghost
    For my birthday last year Cory got me a fishtank/aquaponic microgreens garden (referral link). For this year’s birthday we finally set it up. We named the fish Ghost. Because he is spooky. He seems content in his current puddle….
  • Salem by Train and Salem by Boat
    My commute from Salem to Boston and back again is very soothing and whimsical—commuter rail and sometimes the ferry. Here is a collection of some of my favorite commutes, in various seasons and weather situations….
  • Beverly and Brioche
    We had the coziest Saturday. We went walking in Beverly in the snow. It was very cold and snowing only a little bit. We walked through town and we walked by the ocean until we got too cold to walk and then we drove home. When we got home we made brioche muffins filled with blueberries….
  • 2022 was the year of the fire ant: the story of my first anaphylaxis/anaphylactic shock
    Brooks asks two questions to see if a person has a sense of their life’s meaning: 1. Why do you exist? 2. For what would you be willing to die? The first question I answered pretty easily. The second question I didn’t have an answer to until New Year’s Eve, when it was answered for me. 1. Why do you exist? Because I want to. 2. For what would you be willing to die? At least one ant. Apparently….
  • Бульон с клецками (bul’on s kletskami, bouillon with dumplings)—Russian/Eastern European/Hungarian farina dumplings
    I have no idea how the recipe got into my family if it didn’t get into theirs; for all I know it came from a friend of a friend and not from a long line of relatives—horizonal transmission rather than vertical, maybe bouncing around between Jewish and Russian and back again and again until it reached us….
  • Meaning in Learning and in Communicating Science to the Public
    We talked about the differences between how we communicate about science with the public vs. with other scientists. The most important difference is not the language, which is what I had been focusing on, but that the order of things is inverted: in science we communicate 1. the necessary background, 2. then supporting details, 3. then our results and conclusions; when we communicate with the public we should be presenting 1. the bottom line, 2. then the so-what/why it matters, 3. and only then the supporting details….
  • 2022 → 2023: New Year’s resolutions and reflections and салат оливье (salat olivye, Olivier salad)
    My resolutions for 2023: Start every day with 20 minutes of a passion project for lab and 20 minutes writing fiction. I’ve been trying 20 minutes each on lab passion projects and writing fiction this winter break and I’ve found that I get more done than I usually do and I am happier with my day….
  • The Great British Purgatory Show: The Great British Baking Show/The Great British Bake Off is actually purgatory (spoilers)
    To review the evidence, The Great British Baking Show: 1. is inhabited by souls, seeing as there are people and people contain souls; 2. —and those souls are sinners, seeing as we are all sinners; 3. is primarily premised on cooking under intense time pressure, which is a form of mental anguish and suffering; 4. is both cleansing and purifying, both to the contestants and to the viewers—thus fitting the definition of purgatory. And: 5. every week/episode, the objective is to survive; 6. every week/episode, someone does not; 7. in The Great British Baking Show, time is not real; 8. it is possible, from The Great British Baking Show, to reach nirvana….
  • Sharlotka, radish salad, and doing my best
    When I successfully studied for and got my driver’s license, I did not do my best. I scheduled lessons, more or less once a week, and I showed up. I took the commuter rail and then the orange line or the red line and I arrived at the designated place at the designated time with the designated amount of cash, somehow never late….
  • Getting started running viral-ngs workflows in Terra for no-code, scalable sequence analysis
    Our lab’s sequence analysis toolkit and codebase, called viral-ngs, is housed in Terra, a smart, no-code interface for running analyses on any number of samples. viral-ngs is our lab’s collection of frequently used, modular, generalizable computational workflows. My three favorite workflows are demux_plus, assemble_refbased, and align_and_plot….
  • “Fun, exciting, and interesting along the way”—Lab Alumni PIs Academic Career Panel
    Everyone seemed happy. After the conversations I’m used to it was like stepping out of a loud smoke-filled bar into an open hillside with cows grazing. I want to share it with you, in case you see a potential future for yourself in academia, like I do, because I was reassured to know that that hopeful future can stay hopeful and light and that there are people in my field who love their jobs….
  • Spooky Lab Halloween Decorations
    Our labmates Cindy and Jess decorated the lab for Halloween! The decorations have been spookening my life all October. The spiderwebs are my favorite by far. They extend into my own office window. My desk is also decorated, but I keep these decorations up year-round….
  • Salem Decorates Itself for Halloween
    Everyone decorates for Halloween, but the truth is, for the most part, Salem decorates itself. The gorgeous foliage? That’s just how it is here. The graveyards everywhere? That’s just how it is here. The pumpkins growing in the front yard? We didn’t plant them. The spiderwebs outside our house? We didn’t plant them either. That guy dressed up as a clown? He’s an actual clown. It’s not his fault you’re terrified of him….
  • Getting started using R for data analysis and visualization
    Our lab is split pretty evenly between people who use Python for data analysis and visualization and people who use R for data analysis and visualization. I strongly prefer R, because it was made specifically for data analysis, but there is no wrong answer. R is especially powerful because of the added functionality of its libraries, such as dplyr and ggplot2….
  • Getting started using regular expressions for pattern matching and smart find and replace
    Regular expressions (nicknamed regex) are an extremely powerful (and in my opinion vastly underused) tool for pattern matching and find and replace. Here are some things I have recently used regex for: changing the format of dates from 10/5/2022 to 2022-10-05; scraping a web page to retrieve the first image appearing in each web page it links to….
  • How to Get a Global Entry Interview Appointment Really Fast (With the Power of Code)
    I wanted not only to be able to check if an appointment has opened up, but also to not have to be the one checking. And even if something is checking for me, I also did not want to have to stare at that something. I wanted something that would check continually for free appointments and beep loudly and repeatedly if one appeared….
  • Songs to Save Me From Vecna: accidentally a story of how friends shared music during my parents’ adolescence in the Soviet Union and my 90s/2000s/2010s childhood as a 1.5th generation immigrant
    This blog post is not about Stranger Things. These are a list of songs that would save me from Vecna, the robotics company in Waltham that has repeatedly appeared to me ever since I started college, as if an apparition, coincidentally at the time and place of career fairs….
  • My Morning Shower Uses 22.4 Gallons: Comparing Water Usage of My Water-Using Activities to Reduce My Water Use During Our Massachusetts Drought
    Ten of the 14 counties of Massachusetts are currently in a Level 3 drought, Critical Drought—including Suffolk County, which contains Boston; Middlesex County, which contains Cambridge and Somerville; and Essex County, which contains Salem. This is a ban on all non-essential outdoor water use (not including our vegetable garden)….
  • Cars We Saw at North Shore Pride
    To my absolute delight Pride turned out to be in part a car show. I know cars aren’t exactly the point of Pride, but it was an unusually good day for cars, even for the North Shore. I am very excited to show you the cars….
  • All the Cods We Saw at Cod Fest/Fireworks Over Peabody/Houses Older Than America
    Years ago, on the 4th of July, rather than go to a single fireworks show my family went driving in Pennsylvania, hills and valleys and hills and valleys, passing town after town, and at all times we were surrounded by fireworks, not one show but many, all at once and all around us. It was my favorite 4th of July. This 4th of July felt like that. Ocean air, not cold Pennsylvania air, and the window of a house, rather than a car driving and the wind on us, and different people I love around me—but like that….
  • Little Library DIY
    Our little library is painted black and the books have a sometimes spooky tint, because we live in a not-yet-painted-black house that may or may not have its own soul. Spooky books are often also joyful books, and hopeful books—but sometimes just spooky. This is a blog post about how we made the library/libraries….
  • What I’ve Learned About Making Scientific Posters
    My goal was entirely to do justice to the work and the massive number of people who did that work, but to my surprise and delight we won a poster prize in the Computational Biology and Data Science category, which as you might imagine is one of the largest and most interesting categories at the Broad….
  • Little Libraries of Centre County
    There are, of course, many more little libraries I did not see than there are little libraries I did see. And some of the ones I did see were not on any map—which means there could be surprise libraries on any street we could step into on a meandering walk like those we had together in the evenings this June, and even making a thorough scavenger hunt of it would not guarantee I found them all….
  • “Don’t disturb them… They are gestating.”
    I have always loved Easter egg hunts. This weekend, which was special because it was Passover and American Easter here and my mom’s birthday far away and it was warm and flowers were starting to come up and children were walking around with their baskets, we played Easter bunny and hid a ton of eggs around Salem and Peabody and Somerville and Cambridge….
  • Window View
    Cars bring up rain from the street and their headlights illuminate it and the lights and the chimneys and the treetops are outlined in the bright night sky, and you can just see the lights on our fence. I grew up in a neighborhood without fences, low to the ground; now I live and I work exclusively in tall places, surrounded always by the little lights of other people’s lives….
  • Ten Strategies I Use to Work Through Burnout or Mild Depression or Scatterbrainedness (and Other Low-Motivation Moments)
    I. Make it a priority to take good care of yourself. II. Clarify your goals. III. Reinforce your reward system. IV. Rolling for Initiative: remove decisions. V. Group tasks with similar tasks or with things you enjoy. VI. Schedule as many tasks as you can. VII. Join or form an accountability group. VIII. Pomodoro. IX. Do as much of a task as you’re willing to do. X. Schedule breaks, accept your needs, and give yourself time….
  • The Story of Our Cell Cover
    Possibly the coolest thing that’s happened to me, definitely the coolest thing that’s happened to me professionally, is getting to be a part of a project that not only got to be in Cell, but also got to be on the cover of Cell. In this blog post, I want to tell you about the process that created that cover, because it’s very different from anything else that has happened to me and I think it went extraordinarily well….
  • Tweeting About Your Science: My Guide/What I’ve Learned
    All of the notable things I have ever done—being born, my weird space cow art, my long-form blogging about my mental health, my long-form blogging about underwear, probably other things—were on October 21st rapidly surpassed or at least matched in measurable viewership by 35 words, one emoji, two images, and a link….
  • Christmas
    This story feels particularly and joyfully American to me, a little island of childhood happiness in a process that I don’t think is easy for any family that goes through it. We were very new here, but we were determined to be Americans; we felt welcome to and all did our best impression of the traditions that were to be our chosen inheritance, a magical first American Christmas….
  • Three Kinds of Russian Pancakes: Сырники (Syrniki, Cheese Pancakes), My Grandmother’s Recipe; Оладьи (Oladi, Kefir Pancakes); and Traditional Russian Блины (Bliny, Crepes)
    Today I want to teach you (and the future me reading this) how to make сырники, really delicious Russian cheese pancakes I remember fondly from my childhood and have just this year finally learned how to make myself. I am also going to share with you оладьи (oladi), small fluffy pancakes made with kefir, and an old, traditional recipe for блины (bliny), Russian crepes that my mom remembers from her childhood and which she shared with me for my birthday this year….
  • Birds and Baby Birds Doing Their Best At Our Fire Escape Bird Feeder
    To get in, pigeons have scrambled (very undignified) and slipped (very undignified) on the curved roof, tried the walls that aren’t open (undignified), and, most importantly here, stood on the roof on one leg while reaching the other leg down to the railing—a good idea—a good idea that never works, but a good idea—that sometimes results in stepping on another pigeon….
  • The Free Book Cycle, Crayons, and Answering Reader Discussion Questions for Don’t Look Behind You by Lois Duncan
    When I finish a book I enjoyed I usually read through to the acknowledgements and, if it’s a teen book, the reader discussion questions. Just for fun, just this once, I decided to actually answer them….
  • Freaky Mushroom Abominations, Now in Convenient Flesh Tones
    There is something deeply special and human and good-feeling to growing mushrooms. They smell nice like dirt smells nice and you get to water them and watch them grow every day and know that they are growing because you are watering them. The experience was extra special because I bought my parents a box, too, and I got to see their progress growing their own matching mushrooms while I grew mine….
  • Really Easy Lunches That Feel Fancy
    You might have noticed a pattern here—usually boxed carb and something else, usually something that lasts a long time between grocery trips. Most things can be swapped out for most other things—another protein instead of the egg, fresh for frozen, frozen for fresh. If you buy all the different kinds of boxes of mac and cheese, and all the different kinds of boxes of rice pilaf and couscous and similar things, and all the different kinds of other boxed carbs you like, you can get a real sense of novelty in your meals….
  • Ten Scraps of Interview Advice
    I remember that during my own college admissions interviews I found it very helpful to go for a nice walk beforehand. My MIT interview was on campus at Penn State, across the street from the then new-ish and still very fancy computer science/information sciences and technology building. There was snow on the ground, and I walked around a rose garden and looked at the snow on the flowers. It was peaceful. Do whatever you need to do to not be nervous, and to be prepared for a pleasant social interaction….
  • Secret Santas and the Icy Cheer
    I loved skating. The rink was downtown, hidden from the road between tall buildings, and was never crowded even when the other rinks were. A lot of the time the staff played Christmas songs over the big outdoor speakers and sometimes the snow fell while I skated. Whenever I hear certain older Christmas songs that is what I think of, the snow falling and the cold air and the taste of blood from the cold and the pink sky and the tall Chicago downtown just barely darker than the night sky all around me and above me with its beautiful lights….
  • After Years of Struggle, I Finally Learned How to Give an Excellent Presentation
    Usually, when preparing for presentations, I focus almost entirely (or entirely) on my slide deck. I put together a silly number of slides. I make them all perfect. I memorize where they are in my presentation, including backup slides as potential responses to the many, many potential questions I’ve anticipated, which I used to fit at the end and lately, ever since I discovered hidden slides, have been slipping into their places in the narrative as hidden slides….
  • Little Libraries
    I used to get special permission to visit the library extra times during the week if I finished all my books and finished my classwork, and it was always very special to me to get to go. I still remember my room and the layout of our house from when I was that age, and I also still remember the school library and where each section was located and what books were on each level of my favorite shelves….
  • Infectious Disease Reading List: My Qualifying Exam Experiences, Advice, and Syllabi
    Every PhD student I talk with seems to have a different qualifying exam and a different qualifying exam experience. My department, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, has a very flexible and customizable quals, in line with the overall very flexible and customizable PhD program. Our qualifying exams usually happen in the second (G2) year, and consist of the following parts….
  • Freaky Mushroom Abominations/Friends/Food
    Growing oyster mushrooms was a very happy highlight of spring 2018, which I suppose was the first spring and second semester of my PhD. I decided to share some of that happiness with our current not-travelling, working-from-home selves and ordered another oyster mushroom growing kit, this time pink and apparently larger. In celebration and anticipation I want to share with you my photos and notes from the first time around….
  • My Very Favorite Books
    I fell very deeply in love with The Great Gatsby the first time I read it, which of course was eleventh grade English class. It is my very favorite book. I reread The Great Gatsby almost every year in the early fall—not intentionally, not on any schedule; it just happens. The leaves start getting crunchy and something in me feels that it is time to reread The Great Gatsby….
  • How to Protect Yourself From Bedbugs Before They Even Show Up
    Bedbugs. After a lot of suffering the first time through, we were ready—not only for the first attack, but for the second and third as well. In our case, the prophylactic was time pressured and very inconveniently timed. In your case, it can be stretched across any more convenient length of time, to whatever extreme you prefer. I want you to be ready, and that’s why I wrote this blog post….
  • I Got Tested for COVID-19 and It Was Surprisingly Easy and Fast
    Last Sunday (June 28th) at around 10 am after Zoom yoga with my mom I noticed that I had a sore throat and that it kind of hurt to speak. Especially because both my partner Cory and our roommate Helen sometimes have to go to work in person we decided that it would be wise for me to get tested for COVID-19, preferably immediately….
  • Ten-Year Reunion
    High school was a magical time. I was obsessed with the radio, and I carried around a little wind-up Grundig. I knew all the stations in our town, and in the neighboring towns, and I vividly remember the staticky morning talk show wake-ups and the smell of the wet morning air in the early autumn and the hope I had for every single day. I knew all the genres of stations, and I thought I knew all the genres of people….