What are your group’s dissertation defense traditions?
Keller group
Sarah L. Keller, Duane and Barbara LaViolette Endowed Professor of Chemistry:
One year, on a lark, I made a cake that illustrated a graduate student’s research project and used it as a visual aid during my introduction of their dissertation defense. Somehow, the next couple of students’ projects also lent themselves to cakes. (Our lab’s main research focus is on lipid vesicles and cell membranes, which tend to be round. See the stylized montage of microscopy images, above right.) Pretty soon, grad students in my lab began saying, “We are all wondering what your upcoming thesis cake will be!” The pressure was on!
Summary of experiments at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole in a project led by Chantelle Leveille ‘22. The cake represents a yeast cell that is undergoing changes in temperature (top), is budding (middle), or has fluorescently labeled mitochondria (bottom). See C.L. Leveille et al., 2021, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.
Zack Cohen ’23: The cake is a close-up of a membrane made of fatty acids, which have one carbon chain each, so are represented as lollipops. See Z.R. Cohen et al., 2023, ACS Earth Space Chem.
Jonathan Litz ’15: The cake captures the shape and color of a lipid vesicle ruptured on a solid, dark support (and imaged with a Texas red label). See J.P. Litz et al., 2016, Biophys. J.
Matt Blosser ’14: The top image shows a control sample of a phase-separated membrane with a domain of the bright (“liquid-ordered”) phase surrounded by a dark (“liquid-disordered”) phase. The bottom image is a cut-away view of a test sample of a phase-separated membrane in which the membrane has been sheared to offset the domains. See M.C. Blosser et al., 2015, Biophys. J.
Glennis Rayermann ’18: The cake looks like a phase-separated membrane of a yeast vacuole in which contrast is provided by a membrane protein fusion (Vph1-GFP) that emits green light. See S.P. Rayermann et al., 2017, Biophys. J.
Heidi Weakly ’24: Some proteins (represented by puffed rice cereal) bind to one domain of a phase-separated lipid bilayer (the cookie vs. the surrounding brownie) via molecular tethers (the frosting). See H.M.J. Weakly et al., 2024, Biophys. J.
Caitlin Cornell ’20: This big round cake has high contrast only at the perimeter because it represents a lipid vesicle imaged by cryo-electron tomography. The technique requires that big vesicles be broken up into smaller (cupcake-sized) vesicles. See C.E. Cornell et al., 2020, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.
See also Dissertation defense traditions: Vaughan, Cossairt, and Khalil groups