Season’s greetings from your favorite chemical epigenomics lab ;)
This New Year’s Eve, we in the Liau Lab hope that you, your family, and your friends continue to enjoy your holidays and have a great start to the new year! It’s been a year full of challenges and new experiences for all of us, and we owe so much to the healthcare workers, public health officials, and everyone else who has worked to control the pandemic. We are thankful for have had the opportunity to continue our research this past year and beyond :)
Like many others, our lab has been divided into shifts: a morning shift and an evening shift. Luckily for us, we all got to choose the shift that more or less best suits our sleep schedules (or, um, lack thereof). Unsurprisingly, there’s a bit of a difference in the types of people that self-sorted into the two shifts…
Spot-on assessment from Emma. Please note the Comic Sans.
Fig. 1: Representative screenshot illustrating significant morning shift wholesomeness (p < 0.05).
Fig. 2: Representative screenshot illustrating evening shift degeneracy. Results are, of course, not significant.
To help us get accommodate more lab members while still staying at a safe density, our lab was fortunate to annex some new lab space. Take a look!
Thank you to the lab members that graciously accepted banishme— temporary relocation to our annex spaces!
Zoom fatigue? What’s that?
Of course, in an era of distancing and virtual meetings, we’ve been trying to figure out ways to stay connected to each other. Beyond zoom coffee hours, some lab members organized a virtual social over Thanksgiving weekend, where we got to battle for glory in some online games.
Hui Si Kwok, master of deception. Turns out postdoc hands can be used for passaging cells or wiping out your crewmates.
Playing codenames!
Though it was a challenge to adapt our annual holiday party to Zoom, no pandemic was going to get in the way of celebrating another year in Liau Lab history. Thanks to Ceejay for planning this event, and to Emma and others for stepping up to make the annual Year in Review presentation…
it’s fine
Virtual partygoers!
The boss posing with his holiday gift from the lab.
As is traditional, we had a little competition for lab members. This year, Ceejay organized a rousing game of “Brian Bingo”: the game where you predict things Brian will do over Zoom and assemble your own dream bingo board out of them. Although no one got a real bingo, Shelby came the closest. Here’s a look at her winning board:
Red indicates correctly predicted Brian-isms. 5 plus the free space, not bad!
So there you have it! It’s been a long year, and we’ve had our ups and downs, but whether we’re resting or working, we’re trying to do our best to prepare ourselves for the new year.
We’ll leave you with some mouthwatering desserts from Allison’s kitchen:
Allison’s pecan pie.
Allison’s (vegan) pumpkin cheesecake.
Trust us, we’ll need the sugar to get us pumped for the new year. It’s truly been an experience living through 2020, but we’re excited to see what 2021 brings. Until next time, and stay safe!