We went to see the talk by the celebrated Rudolf Jaenish (of transgenic mice fame) at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The talk was fascinating, and touched upon iPS cells in medicine, epigenetic reprogramming, and imprinting. We then took some time afterwards to visit some sights in Kraków. It was a fun trip and a nice way to get out of the daily grind.

Rudolf Jaenish

The talk took place at the wonderful newly built UJ campus - the main auditorium is impressive and the talk was fascinating.

Next to Wawel

We are about to climb the hill of Wawel - the castle where Polish Kings lived before they moved the capital to Warsaw

Wawel

The weather was gorgeous.

Going towards Kazimierz

Kazimierz is the former Jewish quarters of Kraków, with a lot of wonderful restaurants and a rich nightlife

Mariacki Church

The famous church in the main square of Kraków

Congrats to Zuza who has just won her Young Investigator Grant (DSM) from the Department of Biology of the University!!! We celebrated with a little bit of (non-alcoholic) bubbly at lunchtime!

We have just had a new person join the lab. Mostafa has come to us from Cairo, Egypt, and will do an internship in the lab to develop his biomedical research skills. He has only been here a week and is already up and running with the experiments, getting nice results and contributing to our research program. Welcome, Mostafa!

The lab opening today was great fun! Thanks everyone for coming and thank you Zuza and Monika for helping me organize everything.

Before the party

Zuza baked two wonderful cakes and decorated everything. It looks so pretty!

The first guests

Our neighbors the Kargul lab showed up first.

The host with a bottle of bubbly

I opened the first bottle of Cava shortly afterwards.

Blowing out the singing candle

The candle on the cake sang happy birthday and looked like lotus blossom. I blew it out and wished for... well I cannot tell you that - otherwise the wish won't come true.

More guests arriving

Mrs. Ewa Jastrzębska and the Wisniewska lab.

The party in full swing

Everyone looks like they are enjoying themselves.

Visiting the lab

The meeting of two worlds - Krzysztof and Agnieszka Kobielak from CeNT and Kasia Piwocka from the Nencki Institute.

The Proszynski lab visiting

My old lab has come to check out my new place.

We are pretty excited to invite everyone to the lab opening ceremony on October 8 at 3 pm. There will be refreshments (yes, that means free pizza!) and some good ol’ bubbly to keep the conversation flowing. Zuza has promised to bake a mystery cake, which some sources claim will look like a hedgehog. Even though Zuza has already started doing some preliminary experiments, we are only just celebrating lab opening because Monika the postdoc has now arrived from faraway Switzerland to join our efforts to decipher the Hedgehog pathway and have fun in the process. Don’t feel pressured to be on time. We will have some preliminaries around 3 so if you can make it – great, but we will hopefully keep having fun throughout the afternoon, so if you are stuck in the dark room developing these Westerns, don’t stress out – we will have a fresh bottle of champagne waiting for you at 4˚C. The contact info is here. Hope to see you all on Thursday!

We have just returned from Krynica Morska, where the newly formed Niewiadomski lab joined the illustrious Proszynski lab from the Nencki institute on a joint retreat. We’ve had a lot of fun together and almost managed to not talk about science for three days straight. Two songs have been selected as the retreat’s anthems: “Move Bi#$h” by Ludacris and “Senor Loco” by Elena.

Starting October 1st we will have a new lab member – Monika Kusio-Kobiałka, who is coming to join the group after doing her PhD at the Nencki Institute and a postdoctoral stint in Switzerland. Now we have two lab members and both of them love paragliding. Hopefully we will be able to glide into some exciting new discoveries together. Warmest welcome!

Warmest welcome to the first graduate student in the lab, Zuzanna (Zuza) Sas. Zuza is starting this month and will be exploring new avenues of research at the interesection between ciliary biology and cellular signaling.

Three new papers from the lab came out today in Methods in Molecular Biology. See Publications for more details.

We will be hiring a research assistant and a PhD student in the coming weeks. If you know any outstanding scientists who would like to join my lab, please have them apply! The application deadline is July 15th 2015. Click here to download a poster with more information. Here’s a detailed announcement for the research assistant position. Here’s a detailed announcement for the PhD student position.