A Decade In Review – Blood, Sweat, & Sabering

I arrived in Toronto in September of 2009, to a questionably zoned apartment in Chinatown above a seedy knock-off handbag store, where I quickly and gleefully filled my cupboards with dried ramen noodles and slightly-off produce from Kensington Market. It was perfect, and my roommates and I, all charmingly naïve new graduate students at UofT, reveled in our cheap furniture (“I can’t believe someone was throwing this away!”) and alarming proximity to the El Mocambo’s never-ending live music, which rocketed through our paper-thin walls like they didn’t exist. I was fresh from a non-genetics undergraduate program at The University of Guelph, and to this day I’m supremely thankful for whoever on the MoGen admissions committee read my application and decided to take a chance on me – an applicant with a transcript strewn with literature courses, and only a limited background in molecular biology. Thankful that they had enough coffee (or wine?) in them to see that I was invested enough in genetics – an area that I broke into only during the final year of my undergraduate – that I would be able to succeed in their top-tier research program.  

Determined to prove this mystery admissions committee member right and make a great impression during my rotations, I decided to throw myself completely into the semi-planned mini-projects that overworked post-docs in my three rotation labs dreamed up for me. Then right on cue, I promptly got H1N1 (remember when that was something?) and missed almost the entirety of my second rotation. This was a problem for two reasons – one is that swine flu was terrible (since then the only thing more unpleasant has been childbirth), the other is that I was rotating through Brenda Andrews’ lab, the group that I knew I wanted to join after having been there for about five minutes. Amazingly, inexplicably, the department took another chance on me. Brenda accepted me into her lab, under the co-supervision of her Donnelly Centre neighbour Charlie Boone, in spite of the fact that I’d missed a huge portion of my rotation there, and in spite of the fact that I accidentally said “STD” instead of “SGA” (a much-used lab technique in both groups) when I gave my rotation lab meeting. Phew, and also, wow.

I spent the next five and a half years blissed out on yeast genomics. I could most often be found crouched behind one of the many, many kinds of microscopes that my project required, or wading through huge excel sheets of phenotypic data, trying to make sense of all of the ways you can screw up a cell by mutating it. My focus was originally on the DNA damage response pathway, but when that was done the rest of the cell was waiting, and so I kept on systematically messing up yeast cells until I’d taken terabytes of pictures of phenotypically horrifying cells. I destroyed nuclei, Golgi apparatuses, kinetochores, mitochondria, cell walls – you name it, I togged it up and took pictures in the name of science. These years in the Andrews and Boone labs were formative and irreplaceable. Grad school smashed me apart and rebuilt me as a better, tougher, smarter version of myself. Brenda and Charlie showed me what scientific curiosity and creativity – and what being a mentor – looks like. They also (as importantly) taught me the true meaning of the phrase “work hard, play hard,” that nothing ventured is truly nothing gained, and that there are more occasions than you might think that warrant cutting the top off a champagne bottle with a sabre.

Now in 2019, just months before my ten-year anniversary at UofT, I’m more invested than ever in the MoGen Department, and I’ve found my way to the other side. For the last two years, I’ve been an assistant professor in the teaching stream, and the Director of one of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s newest professional Master’s programs – an M.H.Sc. in Medical Genomics that launched in September of 2018. Now it’s my turn to mentor, and I could not be prouder of this new program, and of what our tireless faculty and inaugural class has already accomplished. Having just raced through one action-packed decade in the MoGen Department, I can’t wait to see what the next decade holds, and I’m so thrilled to be a part of it.  

Hold my sabre, I think this calls for champagne.