This month on the Node – October 2011

What was new on the Node this month? Here are a few of the highlights from October:

MacArthur genius grant for Yukiko Yamashita

Sasha Terashima interviewed Yukiko Yamashita, one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows. The MacArthur foundation hands out “genius grants” of half a million dollars to a select group of people in all areas of arts, science, and humanities. There is no application process, and recipients are free to choose what they do with the money. Half a million out of the blue, with no strings attached – how would you react if you got that phone call?

“When Yukiko received the phone call informing her about being selected and asking her asking her not to discuss it with anyone except her spouse until the official announcement, she had a hard time believing that it was not a scam. “I called my husband right after I hung up my phone call with the foundation and [he] seriously warned me that ‘if you get a second phone call asking your bank account and pin number, so that they can transfer the award money, don’t give it to them.’” “

Academic teaching
If you teach plant science courses, make sure to have a look at Teaching Tools in Plant Biology. In the comments, Mary Williams give some additional advice.

Meanwhile, Lucia Prieto Godino travelled to Uganda to coordinate a course on insect neuroscience and Drosophila neurogenetics. The course members are graduate students and Junior Faculty from Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Cameroon, and in the course they will learn how to effectively use insects to teach or do research in neuroscience. In a later post, Lucia updated us on the course progress after the first few weeks.

One student in the course explains the experiment on olfactory choice in Drosophila that his group performed the day before.

Meetings, Jobs, and more Interviews:
– The entire Company of Biologists Workshop on Growth, Division and Differentiation is covered in a series of posts from the meeting.
– Several PhD and postdoc positions have been posted on the jobs page.
– Interviews with Development Editors Gordon Keller and Ottoline Leyser were reposted on the Node. The interview with Ottoline Leyser sparked a lively discussion on Twitter – more about that later today!

See the full October archive here.

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