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Brian Stramer is our Faculty Member of the Month. He is the group leader at the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics and a lecturer in the Department of Anatomy and Human Sciences at King’s College London. He received his PhD in Cell, Molecular, and Developmental Biology from Tufts University and has a bachelors in Molecular Genetics from the University of Rochester. In this blog, he talks us through a day in his life and what he likes about being a member of the F1000Prime Faculty.

Describe a typical day in your working life:

I do not have a ‘typical’ day as each is completely different.  I guess that is what I enjoy about this work!   It normally starts by frantically trying to get out of the house to drop off our children at school and daycare-which is an appropriate start to the day as the franticness continues at work!

I always learn a lot from reading these interdisciplinary papers and it is clear that cell and tissue mechanics is an area of increasing interest in the current research landscape.

Once at work, my day will be dictated by various teaching or research tasks.  If I am teaching (which I do most Mondays throughout the year), I may be lecturing in the morning and then spending the afternoon in the Dissecting Room (I am a module organizer for a topographic anatomy course).  Immediately after my dissecting practical on Mondays, I then run off to my group’s lab meeting and it can be challenging to switch my brain from teaching to research mode. On other days when teaching is lighter, my day will start by chatting with people in the lab about their planned experiments or any interesting (or frustrating) results that they have recently received.  For better or worse, I currently do not have regular meetings with postdocs and students about their projects.

As my teaching schedule can be erratic, it is impossible to schedule regular meetings. I, therefore, have an open-door policy and prefer it if folks come and chat whenever they feel like it.  If someone has an interesting sample on the microscope they will pop by the office and tell me to come into the scope room; if someone else is struggling to do some data analysis they will stop me in the hallway and bring me to the computer. This sounds like a haphazard way to keep track of the lab, but it kind of works (although maybe the lab will tell me otherwise). 

There isn’t a week that goes by where I have failed to talk with everyone in the group about their individual projects. Although, to be honest, I am pretty superfluous as everyone in the group is incredibly independent.

One thing we have had to make sure we schedule regularly are meetings regarding the collaborative projects in the lab.  Over the last few years, many of our projects have involved a collaboration between someone doing experimental work and another doing data analysis or modelling at the computer.  In these cases, we do need to sit down and chat frequently to make sure that everyone involved understands what everyone else is doing.  Although, even these are often impromptu meetings that someone has decided last minute because they had some issues with their experiments or are struggling with data analysis.

F1000Prime helps me keep on top of relevant manuscripts.  I also like reading about what others think is interesting and how they may have interpreted the significance/relevance of the work.

What kind of environment do you work in?

The laboratory is split over two floors.  The wet bench along with our confocal microscope is on the 3^rd floor, and our Drosophila lab and tissue culture hood is on the 1^st floor.  People get fit running up and down all day long!  Importantly, our offices are all on the 3^rd floor with everyone in the lab sharing the same common room.  This means I can go and visit everyone in the lab and we can shut the door and have loud debates about data interpretation-in which I am normally proven wrong!

What aspect of your work do you particularly enjoy?

I like that no day is the same as the next. I can be teaching about blood vessel histology one moment, meeting with a PhD student about their imaging analysis issues immediately after, and then sitting down to help write a manuscript. It’s difficult to get bored.

I do not have a ‘typical’ day as each is completely different.  I guess that is what I enjoy about this work! 

What do you like about working on F1000Prime and what was your last recommendation?

It helps me keep on top of relevant manuscripts.  I also like reading about what others think is interesting and how they may have interpreted the significance/relevance of the work.  Sometimes I will agree, sometimes I won’t, but often I will get a different perspective on things, which is really important.

My last F1000Prime recommendation was a Nature Physics paper, which examined mechanisms controlling stress relaxation of epithelial monolayers. While I do not have an engineering background, I tend to like reading manuscripts that take an engineer’s perspective of a cell or developmental biology problem.  I always learn a lot from reading these interdisciplinary papers and it is clear that cell and tissue mechanics is an area of increasing interest in the current research landscape.