Cancer Meeting at OHSU Knight Center, Portland (2022)
Washington University has been involved in large NCI consortium projects for years and is currently active in the NCI Genomic Data Analysis Network (GDAN). This year's meeting was hosted at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute and everyone was very pleased that it was in-person rather than remote. |
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Top Photo (L-R): Yizhe Song, Xiangyu Chen, Mike Wendl, Fernanda Martins Rodrigues, Yingduo Song, and Simon Mo
Right Photo: Meeting attendees from the various GDAN Centers (I am kneeling in front row, dark green shirt)
(photos: Guangrong Qin and Jackie Dingman)
Right Photo: Meeting attendees from the various GDAN Centers (I am kneeling in front row, dark green shirt)
(photos: Guangrong Qin and Jackie Dingman)
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Chance Meeting (2022)
Jingxuan (Mimi) Guo was a teaching assistant for me some years ago, but is now preparing to finish her doctoral studies soon in the lab of Nathaniel Huebsch researching cardiac mechano-transduction. This is a highly cross-disciplinary area that investigates how mechanical stimuli are transformed into electrical and/or chemical signaling/action by cells and tissues. We happened bump into each other recently (after my heat transfer class) at the "Statue of Life" (left) in the lobby of Whitaker Hall. It was nice to catch-up after several years. 
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Yige Wu: Start to Finish (2022)
Yige Wu joined as a graduate student in May 2017 (left). This photo was taken on the 3rd floor of the Couch Medical Sciences building and shows:
Back Row (L-R): Steven Foltz, Jay Mashl, Matt Wyczalkowski
Middle Row (L-R): Liang-Bo "Bobo" Wang, Chris Yoon, Dan Cui-Zhou, Amila Weerasinghe, Yige Wu, Reyka Jayasinghe, Song Cao
Front Row (L-R): Matt Bailey, Mike Wendl, Sohini Sengupta
The photo on the right was taken almost exactly 5 years later, April 2022, on Yige's PhD defense day (she was successful) in the same location as the previous photo, with the remaining people reprising their same positions. Standing are Chris, Matt, Yige, Reyka, and Song, with Mike and Sohini in the front row. (Jay was absent that day.)
(photos: Li Ding)
Yige Wu joined as a graduate student in May 2017 (left). This photo was taken on the 3rd floor of the Couch Medical Sciences building and shows:
Back Row (L-R): Steven Foltz, Jay Mashl, Matt Wyczalkowski
Middle Row (L-R): Liang-Bo "Bobo" Wang, Chris Yoon, Dan Cui-Zhou, Amila Weerasinghe, Yige Wu, Reyka Jayasinghe, Song Cao
Front Row (L-R): Matt Bailey, Mike Wendl, Sohini Sengupta
The photo on the right was taken almost exactly 5 years later, April 2022, on Yige's PhD defense day (she was successful) in the same location as the previous photo, with the remaining people reprising their same positions. Standing are Chris, Matt, Yige, Reyka, and Song, with Mike and Sohini in the front row. (Jay was absent that day.)
(photos: Li Ding)
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Wrapping-up of TCGA (2018)
Washington University played an important role in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project over its 12 year history. TCGA is concluding with a flurry of several dozen scientific papers summarizing the findings, essentially "science's current understanding of cancer progression". This snapshot was taken after it was announced that the driver mutations paper was accepted to Cell. WashU people that contributed to this paper are: Standing (L-R): Qingsong Gao, Dan Cui, Amila Weerasinghe, Matt Bailey, Matt Wyczalkowski, and Li Ding Kneeling (L-R): Sohini Sengupta and Mike Wendl (photo: Liang-Bo Wang) |
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Teaching (2018)
I have taught a graduate course, ME 5403, on the mathematical analysis of conduction and convection every spring at Washington University for many years. On this occasion, we were discussing the Piercy-Preston iterative integral approach for Prandtl's transformed boundary layer formulation f ''' + f f '' / 2 = 0, a non-linear ODE that is not easy to solve in exact terms. It looks like I was making some point about the error function at that particular moment. More often than not, this class has been held in room 102 of the venerable Sever Hall, which is significant to me, since I took many classes here myself when I was a student, as did my father when he was a student in the 1950s/1960s. |
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Old Home Week (2017)
L-R: Mike Wendl, Yumi Kasai, and Li Ding. The three of us had all been with the Genome Institute since the early days. Li and I have stayed on at Washington University, while Yumi departed in 2007 for Mount Sinai School of Medicine and has since moved into the corporate world of biomedicine. She happened to be in town for an assignment and dropped in to visit. (photo: Matt Bailey) |
Retired Workhorse (2016)
This is ABI373 #46, which we acquired back in 1994. It produced DNA sequence data for the pilot C. elegans project and for the Human Genome Project. We had numerous such machines running 24/7 in the early days and my first job at the Institute was on developing the Phred trace processor, an FFT-based A/D algorithm for inferring the nucleotide bases from the 373 output stream. This particular unit was retired in 1998 and it now sits in one of the lobbies here at the Institute. Costing around $150,000 when new, leaps in technology development rendered these machines obsolete in just a few years and they are now mostly just interesting relics.
(photos: Mike Wendl)
This is ABI373 #46, which we acquired back in 1994. It produced DNA sequence data for the pilot C. elegans project and for the Human Genome Project. We had numerous such machines running 24/7 in the early days and my first job at the Institute was on developing the Phred trace processor, an FFT-based A/D algorithm for inferring the nucleotide bases from the 373 output stream. This particular unit was retired in 1998 and it now sits in one of the lobbies here at the Institute. Costing around $150,000 when new, leaps in technology development rendered these machines obsolete in just a few years and they are now mostly just interesting relics.
(photos: Mike Wendl)
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Cancer Genomics Group at the Washington University McDonnell Genome Institute (2013)
Front Row, sitting (L-R): Chris Miller, John Wallis, Joelle Veizer, Michael Wendl
Middle Row (L-R): Ling Lin, Kai Ye, Li Ding, Heather Schmidt, Krishna Kanchi
Back Row (L-R): Cyriac Kandoth, David Larson, Michael McLellan, Dong Shen, Charles Lu, Beifang Niu, Dan Koboldt, Mingchao Xie
(photo: McDonnell Genome Institute)
Front Row, sitting (L-R): Chris Miller, John Wallis, Joelle Veizer, Michael Wendl
Middle Row (L-R): Ling Lin, Kai Ye, Li Ding, Heather Schmidt, Krishna Kanchi
Back Row (L-R): Cyriac Kandoth, David Larson, Michael McLellan, Dong Shen, Charles Lu, Beifang Niu, Dan Koboldt, Mingchao Xie
(photo: McDonnell Genome Institute)
Genome Institute Faculty and Staff (2010)
This picture is taken in the same spot as the one further below, except a decade later. I'm in the second row, standing second from left next to my longtime colleague Dr. John Wallis. Richard Wilson (front row, 4th from right) had taken over as director of the Institute by this time (its name had also changed from the Genome Sequencing Center). He thought it would be good if we all looked cool by wearing sunglasses, although, if you look closely, there were a few non-conformists.
(photo: McDonnell Genome Institute)
This picture is taken in the same spot as the one further below, except a decade later. I'm in the second row, standing second from left next to my longtime colleague Dr. John Wallis. Richard Wilson (front row, 4th from right) had taken over as director of the Institute by this time (its name had also changed from the Genome Sequencing Center). He thought it would be good if we all looked cool by wearing sunglasses, although, if you look closely, there were a few non-conformists.
(photo: McDonnell Genome Institute)
Genome Sequencing Center social events (2002, 2003)
Throughout its existence, the Center hosted elaborate social gatherings for its large staff and faculty, especially during the summer months and the Christmas season. (Left Image) 2002 summer picnic at Tower Grove Park Turkish Pavilion (L-R): Craig Pohl, Mike Wendl, Kevin Crouse, Mike Dante, Scott Smith. (Right Image) 2003 holiday party at Bevo Mill (L-R): Asif Chinwalla, Michele Chinwalla, Mike Wendl.
(photos: Kelly Carpenter)
Throughout its existence, the Center hosted elaborate social gatherings for its large staff and faculty, especially during the summer months and the Christmas season. (Left Image) 2002 summer picnic at Tower Grove Park Turkish Pavilion (L-R): Craig Pohl, Mike Wendl, Kevin Crouse, Mike Dante, Scott Smith. (Right Image) 2003 holiday party at Bevo Mill (L-R): Asif Chinwalla, Michele Chinwalla, Mike Wendl.
(photos: Kelly Carpenter)
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Genome Sequencing Center faculty and staff participants in the Human Genome Project (2000)
This low-rez scan is from a photo taken just before the publication of the first human genome on the front lawn of the Genome Sequencing Center. Center director Robert Waterston is in the front row, 3rd from the left, and I am in the 3rd row, extreme right. Of the worldwide HGP collaboration, we contributed about 20% of the final sequence.
(photo: Washington University Genome Sequencing Center)
This low-rez scan is from a photo taken just before the publication of the first human genome on the front lawn of the Genome Sequencing Center. Center director Robert Waterston is in the front row, 3rd from the left, and I am in the 3rd row, extreme right. Of the worldwide HGP collaboration, we contributed about 20% of the final sequence.
(photo: Washington University Genome Sequencing Center)
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Bioinformatics Meeting (circa 1995)
Bioinformatics people meeting at the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center in the early days of the Human Genome Project. Front Row, sitting (L-R): Gabor Marth, Ryan Brinkman Back Row, standing (L-R): David Hodgson, Don Blair, Michael Holman, David Ficenec, Michael Wendl, Jeremy Parsons (photo: LaDeana Hillier) |
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Starting Out as a Post-Doc (1994)
I was hired by Robert Waterston out of grad school to work on math, stats, and bioinformatics aspects of the early automated Sanger DNA sequencing data analysis problems in the run-up to sequencing the first substantial model organism genome, C. elegans, and ultimately the first human genome. These were engineering projects as much as they were scientific research projects and much of the computational infrastructure had to be developed from scratch. In these days, most of my work was on Phred and the XGASP pipeline for processing the sequence data. (L) Trying to work while Gabor Marth photobombs; (R) First badge (photo: Don Blair) |
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