Shape Your Ph.D. 4: What is the Question?

GradFUTURES is pleased to launch “Shape your PhD”- an interdisciplinary learning cohort on Thursdays, Sep 22-Nov 10, 6-7.30 pm. This learning cohort, designed especially for G1 and G2 students, will involve active learning methods driving the direction of content. Over 6-7 sessions, join us to reimagine, explore and visualize a holistic PhD experience focused on your personal and professional growth.

We invite you to attend, even if you were unable to attend the past events of this cohort.

This is the fourth session of Shape your PhD interdisciplinary learning cohort. In this session, guest speaker Dr. Itai Yanai will discuss the creative thinking aspects of the research process that happens behind the scenes termed night science. Through What is the Question, Dr. Yanai outlines that a discovery is unexpected- an unknown unknown- and often does not fit neatly into a ‘knowledge gap’. A crucial step in many discoveries is the invention or the refocusing of the research question, and we will explore ways in which questions may be formulated or rephrased for research progress.  

Pre-reading: What is the Question, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher, Genome Biology

 

Bio: Dr. Itai Yanai is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU Langone School of Medicine.  His research looks at dynamic biological processes through the lens of gene regulation. Using his training as an experimental embryologist, a molecular biologist, and an evolutionary and computational biologist, he is exploring how gene regulatory pathways are deployed at the molecular level. One of the goals of his research group is to make a comprehensive determination of gene expression in every cell in  nematode C. elengans and computationally analyze this complete atlas to infer gene regulatory pathways. Along with Dr. Martin Lercher, Dr. Yanai co-authored the popular science book The Society of Genes, which discusses how genes compete and cooperate in our genome. Also in collaboration with Dr. Lercher, Dr. Yanai discusses the exciting and significant parts of scientific research that occur behind the scenes, called “night science” and explores the creative side of scientific thinking in a collection of editorials in Genome Biology and associated podcasts. Dr. Yanai earned PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University and pursued postdoctoral training at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Harvard University. He served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Biology at Technion -Israel Institute of Technology between 2008-2016. In 2016, he joined NYU Langone Health. 

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