Angie Voyles Askham

@avaskham.bsky.social

971 Followers 772 Following

senior media relations manager @ Stellate Communications

Are there any traditions or practices from the labs you trained at that you will implement in your lab? I did my Ph.D. in György Buzsáki’s lab. Whenever anyone left the lab, György would give an awkward speech about the story of the person’s time in the lab. The person leaving would, in turn, give their own speech from their perspective and talk about what they learned from György and the other lab members. It was all quite touching, and I think it really helped the lab feel like a community that valued the people who came through and the time they spent there. It also showed new lab members just how nonlinear research can be—no one ended up doing the project they had planned when they joined. I’ve seen a lot of amazing speeches, and I hope to have a similar “celebration of the time in the lab” practice in my own group. The other thing I’d like to carry forward is that the lab always has lunch together. Both my Ph.D. and postdoc labs did this, and it’s quite nice for building a sense of community.
Are there any traditions or practices from the labs you trained at that you will implement in your lab? I plan to use a “slide stack”—a practice that worked well for me when I was a trainee. Basically, every trainee will maintain a running Google Slides document, and every week, the trainee can add updates about their projects. This allows me to preview everything before one-on-one meetings, making them more efficient. For the trainee, the slide stack will act as an archive of checkpoints—which is helpful for “debugging” things throughout the projects—and as a template for making polished materials for talks and papers.
Kennedy's proposed research is unlikely to find that ultrasound scans or food additives increase the likelihood of autism, as research has found no associations between autism and these exposures. In fact, environmental exposures account for less than 20 percent of autism cases; about 80 percent of cases are linked to genetic factors, as innumerable studies have proven. Furthermore, assigning likelihood is not simple. Some environmental exposures will result in autism only for people with specific genetic vulnerabilities. Kennedy's plan is also missing other potential environmental contributions to autism's apparent rise. He has not discussed exploring maternal health, even though pregnant women's health conditions can increase the likelihood that a child has autism. For example, children of women who take the drug valproate for epilepsy during pregnancy have a 4.42 percent higher likelihood of autism, and children of women with untreated infections or diabetes during pregnancy also have higher chances of having autism.