Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) is a wonderful program that gives students pursuing their first degree (Bachelor’s) a chance to experience what Graduate School and research is all about. I myself am a graduate of an REU program (the one in Arecibo Puerto Rico, yea that one, *back pat*) and support the experience that it provides to students across the nation.

In the KochLab we’ve had two previous REU students (Patrick Jurney and Kenji Doering, for Googling purposes) that had pretty successful programs. Pat spent the summer learning a ton about microfabrication and developed some microchannels that unfortunately we never pursued after his departure. Kenji did the preliminary studies for my experiments now, involving protein and kinesin stability in D2O.

And now I’d like to introduce Alexandria Haddad:

She is our latest student. In a fit of either pure genius or sheer insanity, someone tricked the federal government into supporting students during the school year instead of just during the summer to provide them a REAL experience of what it is like to be in grad school: suffering through classes while struggling to keep up in the lab.

To smooth everything out, she will be with us for the entire school year (Summer REU’s last 10 weeks).

She came to us through a new nanophotonics REU (I think) and she has proudly told me that this lab was not her first choice but she picked us anyways, and bless her soul, she let me be her mentor. So now I have the privileged distinction of telling all of you that she wasn’t my first choice either! Nor my second.

I’m KIDDING (but only because I know she will be reading this)!

All kidding (or am I) aside, I’m really excited to be involved with Alex. She immediately sees the benefits of open notebook science drawing parallels to the early days of open source coding and is super excited to be involved in cutting edge research. I get to show her the ins and outs of a biophysics lab and guide her toward a career of (somewhat) ethical science and proper notebook keeping.

Besides showing her what research and lab life is all about, my biggest hope is that I can teach her to be a good scientist. I want to show her how to take clean data, to ensure that her experiments are repeatable, and to help her to understand what bad science is and why we’re different. If she leaves here with only one thing, it will be this and this program will be a huge success for her.

I also want her to have a meaningful experience. Most REU students are subject to just following a grad student around and doing meaningless tasks and then reporting on work that someone else mostly did. Alex is quite capable of doing anything that I can do in the lab and she will! In fact

She has started her own notebook over at WordPress.com which you can find here: Alex Haddad’s Notebook. I’m also going to link to it in the sidebar so that it is always accessible from the main page, and try to add a feed so you see what her latest posts are. If you check here often, I encourage you to visit Alex’s notebook from time to time as well.

With that said I just have to say: Welcome, Alex!