Kevin
Kevin first got involved with his lab in January 2020. Here’s what Kevin had to say about how he got started with his lab and then what that work looked like once going in-person was no longer a possibility.
He said, “I got involved with the Choi Lab back in January 2020 and was going down to Feinberg regularly for a couple of months before leaving Evanston in March. When I joined, I was new and very much unfamiliar with many basic lab techniques, so I spent most of my time during that month or two learning procedures such as gel electrophoresis and PCR preparations. With the COVID-19 pandemic, I started a bioinformatics-heavy approach to my existing work, which allowed me to work from New Jersey over spring and summer 2020. Transitioning to a bioinformatics-heavy research approach was surprisingly smooth given the circumstances. It was essentially skipping the in-person lab portion and going straight to data analysis. I also had some coding and data analysis experience prior to joining the lab, and other lab members were working on similar projects and readily imparted their wisdom on me. My biggest challenge was that I was now working from a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach, so I spent a lot of time teaching myself the concepts behind the data while analyzing them at the same time. Half of my time was spent getting my pipelines to work, and the other half was spent bugging Dr. Choi or other lab members about conceptual questions or having them go over the concepts with me. Everyone at the Choi lab has been super helpful in transferring my work to a digital-heavy format, whether it was getting me set up with Northwestern’s computer cluster QUEST or bearing with me through all my many technical questions. I thank Dr. Jaehyuk Choi and Dr. Yuan Quan in particular for their mentorship and working with me during the transition at the beginning of and throughout the pandemic.”