Our fist lab outing in Chile was a success!!!. Thanks to all lab people (Janneke, Ivan, Miles, Alfredos, and Juan) and to ECIM, ECIM’s people, and special thanks to Glenda Llanos and Sergio Navarrete for setting up all the logistics for us and setting us up with the best room ever to hold a meeting/brainstorming/workshop sesh.

Some pics documenting キメロ.LAB@ ECIM ’16

In a nutshell: We learned to code in C and to code Arduino controller boards (thanks 2 Ivan), about Las Cruces urban history and development (thanks 2 Janneke), about cosmology (thanks 2 Alfredo L), about neurobiology (thanks 2 Alfredo A), about cellular automata & philosophy of science (thanks 2 紀皇) and Ecology (thanks 2 Miles). At the same time we also sampled and learned intertidal ecology as well as eat our ass off at the town local sea food restaurants. We also focused (or attempted to) on a strategy for experiments and theory to understand bacteria (or maybe all cell types) in space and time after all we learned from the outing.

The timetable was almost followed on time Dutch/Chilean/French/US style.

We welcome Gabriel Ramos to the Lab. Gabriel is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Department of Physics (DFI) at U.Chile’s FCFM pursuing a Ph.D degree working with Rodrigo Soto and Maria Luisa Cordero. He is interested in bacteria-driven droplet dynamics in chemo attractant gradients.

The HKUST video channel has publish the talks from the amazing workshop on symplifying biology from the perspective of physics, held at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 香港科技大學 , that Janneke and Juan attended on December 2014. Here a selection of 4 talks:

1.-Opening by Bob on spherical cows and arrogant bulls.

2.-Talk by Juan on bacterial waves and metabolic fields.

3.-Talk by Shashi on active matter and coupled oscillators.

4.-Bob’s Talk about field theory in biology.

Janneke and 纪皇 (Juan) are back from the 2016 Shenzhen Assembly in 深圳, 中国 where the amazing 中国人 treated us very nicely and made us feel at home. We learned a lot about DIY sensors and most importantly how to remember to evolve exponential responsibility in the face of an exponential growth of many technologies such as cheap prototyping, open source electronics, DIY biology and learning and teaching open science in hacker spaces. Shenzhen is an amazing city to accelerate learning and teaching with open technologies. In particular we have made many new friends in the maker movement who share our interests in open science and open education such as Seeed studio and Open FIESTA.

Million thanks to co-organizers Sage Bionetworks, CRI-Paris, Institut Pasteur and 清华大学 for putting together such an intellectual and emotional treat!

For geographical balance in the Keymer lab, we are happy to host Ivan, coming from France for a 6-month internship to work on theoretical biology and maybe get his hands dirty on the lab´s bench.

Alfredo is joining the lab continuing his efforts to help us understand the spatial ecology of neuronal assemblages.

All the way from Baltimore, Miles made it to the south cone to start his PhD in Ecology @ PUC and to work with us learning and teaching theoretical ecology.

From January 1st 2016, Janneke is back with the Keymer Lab, this time as Lab Manager to help us keep calm.

Congratulations to Fabai who defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled Spatial organization in nano-sculptured bacteria, a tale of shape, scale, patterns, and genomes on October  27, 2015

Phys.org published a note about our artice on bacteria invading together an antibiotic landscapes without having develop yet antibiotic resistence. check it out here.

antibiotic landscapes