BGS Career Development

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Announcements

Announcing 2021 Call for Yale Ciencia Academy

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Applications are open for the 2021 Yale Ciencia Academy (YCA) for Professional Development, an NIH-funded (1R25GM114000) program that equips grad students from underrepresented backgrounds with the knowledge, skills, and networks to advance their careers and secure great postdoctoral positions aligned with their professional goals.

The program is open to doctoral students in the life and behavioral sciences in the final 1-2 years of their programs who are conducting research in areas funded by the National Institutes of Health. 

2020-2021 Penn 3MT Competition

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Deadline: March 15, 2021

Penn 3MT is a university-sponsored competitive speaking competition designed to showcase graduate student research in three-minute talks to a general audience. This is a terrific opportunity for graduate students engaged in substantive original research to develop communication skills and share their work with faculty, students, and staff from across the University.

In addition to bragging rights, prizes will be awarded to the top three winners and an audience choice winner. To enter, students must submit a video of their three-minute talk to Penn 3MT. From those submissions, finalists will be chosen to compete in the campus wide online competition.

Learn more and submit your video: https://bit.ly/3_MT

Cosponsored by GAPSA, Penn Libraries, Career Services, CURF, and the Grad Center

Penn Society for Psychedelic Science Seminar Series

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This semester, the Penn Society for Psychedelic Science is hosting a seminar series showcasing the broad range of research – from molecules, to brains, to societies – that is New and Noteworthy in Psychedelic Science. Join us roughly every other Tuesday at 4pm starting this Tuesday February 16th, where we are delighted to have Dr. Sam Vesuna. Dr. Vesuna performed research as an MD/PhD student in the Deisseroth lab at Stanford studying the neural circuits underlying self-self and self-other interactions. This week, he will be presenting his work on cortical circuits underlying ketamine-induced dissociative states, published in Nature.

Join us on future weeks to hear from Dr. David Olson, Joshua Falcon, and Dr. Ruben Laukkonen! Finally, we would love to thank BGSA for sponsoring this series and MindCORE for hosting us on their CrowdCast server. Register for Sam Vesuna, David Olson, Joshua Falcon, and Ruben Laukkonen at these links!

Discussion with Leonard Hayflick, PhD, 2020 Distinguished Graduate Award Recipient

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Date: 03/01/2021
Time: 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EST
Location: Virtual Event via BlueJeans Events
Registration: www.alumni.upenn.edu/dga2020hayflick

Leonard Hayflick, C’51, G’53, GR’56, a native Philadelphian, is currently Professor of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1962, as a member of the Wistar Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he discovered that cultured normal human cells had a limited ability to divide, overturning a 60-year-old dogma that all cells are potentially immortal. He interpreted his discovery to be aging at the cell level, which launched the modern era of aging research by redirecting its cause to intracellular events.

He also discovered that only cancer cells are immortal, which redirected research to how mortal normal human cells become immortal cancer cells.

Hayflick found that frozen normal human cells “remembered” their doubling level after thawing and discovered that the counting mechanism was located in the cells’ nucleus. The Nobel Prize was awarded to those who found the molecular mechanism for Hayflick’s phenomenological discoveries. Chromosome ends (telomeres) shorten at each cell division until their “Hayflick Limit” is reached, but cancer cell immortality was caused by an enzyme (telomerase) that synthesizes the molecules lost from their telomeres.

Hayflick also discovered that normal human cells replicated every human virus then known and developed the technology that enabled safer vaccines, thus benefiting more than one billion people. He invented an inverted microscope for cell culture work that is the father of all current inverted microscopes. It has been accessioned by the Smithsonian Institution along with packages of polio and rabies vaccines produced in his normal human cell strain WI-38.

Hayflick discovered that the cause of “walking pneumonia” was not a virus, as previously believed, but mycoplasmas, the smallest free living microorganisms known. He named the organism Mycoplasma pneumoniae that he grew on a unique medium and used worldwide.

Among Hayflick’s many honors is the John Scott Award from the City Council of Philadelphia, the oldest scientific award in the United States. It was established in 1816 to honor Benjamin Franklin.