This past week has been rather busy for me but also very exciting. Busy because I had to give the seminar talk in front of my whole program on Monday. That includes graduate students as well as faculty. Further, the seminar talks are usually 50+ minutes long; I had never given a presentation that long before. The problem was that although I have done a lot while I've been here, the stuff I have done isn't very presentable. I needed a concrete example of the use of a method for which I had made tools for. Its like I had made a sledge hammer, something brand new and never before seen, but I had yet to show it could tear down walls. Thus, the last week or so was not filled with antagonizing over what to say or how to present my work, rather it was doing the work so that I had something to show for it. Now I will explain what I actually did, so feel free to skip the next paragraph.
I work on methodologies to improve model accuracy given low-resolution crystallographic data. I am specifically focusing on proteins. Getting an accurate model with little error at low resolution is very difficult. In fact, there has yet to exist a mode with little error given low-resolution data. In order to get an accurate model one needs to have a good backbone. This is like saying, in order to have a sound building you must have a solid foundation. Current low-resolution structures don't even have good backbone. There are methods by which you can use hydrogen bond restraints that will keep certain regions of the backbone look like they are suppose to look. These are like extra support for the backbone. However, defining these restraints is fairly tedious. In fact, this process is simply not tractable for large molecules. My tool allows one to easily defining hydrogen bond restraints. After you do this you have to put your model through a process called refinement, luckily the computer does this step. The is where you can get backbone errors but hopefully the restraints keep the errors from occurring. So what I did was take a low-resolution model and refined it without and with several different restraints. The results were good, kind of. The backbone in regions where hydrogen bond restraints were defined looked great. However, other areas gained more errors. That means more research for me, YIPEEE!
Suffice it to say that the presentation went better than expected. I had practiced the talk the day before and got worried because I quickly got tired and my dysdtonic movements got worse making it even more difficult to talk. All though this worried me I was relatively calm going into the seminar. I decided to do something unorthodox that I had done before which is to sit rather than stand to give my presentation. It worked like a charm. I also believe that I did better live because I was getting feedback from the audience. I made them laugh, I could tell that at least some in the audience were engaged, and asking rhetorical question at the right time to further engage them. It was great. I got two similar comments, that I've actually received before, saying that my use of humor was great and actually added to the presentation. I am glad it is done now though!!
Now onto the exciting news. Las fall I had applied for two fellowships. One through the NSF and the other through the NIH. These fellowships pay for my stipend and one helps with tuition. This simply takes the burden off my PIs. I heard back from the NSF and I got the fellowship! After I had received the award letter I decided to check the status of my NIH fellowship... The status bar said that my application had been reviewed but I would nor receive word on wether or not I got funded til council meets in May. However, I was able to see the reviewers comments and the score that the gave me. The score I go was 10. OK...what does that mean? When I started reading the reviewers comments I knew 10 had to be good as there were very little criticisms. But I didn't learn what 10 meant, I went to the web for that. It turns out that what the reviewers do is score the application on different criteria on a 1-9 scale, 1 being the best. then all the reviewers come together, average their individual scores and time by ten to give you your overall score. That mens that the overall score ranges from 10-90. I was flabbergasted! Now I have to see if they'll fund me. I think they will. Now I have to see if I can take both or choose one. This is a dilemma that I don't mind having.
