Today we introduce you to ChemSource, a new Android and iPhone app launched in March this year. ChemSource was developed by P212121 to save you time searching for research chemicals and supplies.

I have interviewed Sean Seaver, founder of P212121, and the person behind ChemSource. Read the interview with Sean here. Read More…

By: Marc Kuchner...

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Postdoc Liton Roy is our featured scientist of the month. You can find Liton on LinkedIn, twitter @LitonRoy, and his website. Read on to find out why Liton decided to pursue a career in chemistry and his passion for Alzheimer’s disease research.

How did you first become interested in Science?
I was good at Math in high school, especially arithmetic and obviously my parents wanted me to be a software engineer. It’s like every parents dream in India that their offspring would be a computer engineer or a doctor. During my senior high, my chemistry teacher told me that I should major in chemistry. I did not know what he saw in me or what he actually meant, but I sort of liked that idea of being something else than cookie cutter computer engineer. I always wanted to be different from the rest of the crowd and that sort of fed the idea to pursue career as a chemist.

How did you first decide your area of research?
While pursuing bachelor’s degree at Presidency College, a Ph.D. student once told me get acquainted with biology and later on I became very interested in biology. I started doing some biochemical research at the Bose Research Institute in India as a summer intern. I took quite a bit of biological chemistry classes during my stay at the Indian Institute of Technology where I did my M.S. in Chemistry. So, after coming to US, all I wanted to do is to solve biological problems. Now I work on de novo protein design using self-selecting secondary structure elements. So far I have developed a high throughout strategy to identify and isolate small highly stable globular proteins from library of peptides.

What is the most challenging situation that you faced in lab?
During my graduate career at the Michigan State University, my Ph.D. advisor decided to leave the university to move elsewhere. At that moment I didn’t know what to do and those were some most difficult times I have faced in my research career thus far. I could not foresee what was coming and I ended up in University of Vermont a year after and I had to start all over again. It was not easy but I don’t have any regrets. Read More…

What percentage of the figures that went into your undergrad, masters or doctorate thesis were ever published? The ones that you didn’t publish were probably good basic science, or figures that didn’t tell a complete story. As a PhD student, I became very aware of the fact that a large amount of my data, although good, would never be published as it did not show significant differences. I then began wondering how many times experiments had been repeated globally unnecessarily. And so FigShare started life as an idea for researchers to publish all of their data that would otherwise never leave their lab books. By categorising and tagging the research, it becomes very searchable and other scientists should not reproduce experiments and waste money when they have been conducted several times by other labs. Following the alpha release, FigShare received a lot of attention and a lot of feedback. This caused the site to develop and it now allows the upload of Figures, Datasets and most recently media (eg. videos)....

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It is the decision that researchers discuss over and over again: stay in academia or move to industry? Blog post after blog post is dedicated to this topic. In December The Economist published  The Disposable Academic, an article explaining why doing a PhD is often a waste of time. To PhD or not? Is it worth spending years working on a PhD or working as a postdoc when only a small percentage actually make tenure?...

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We recently discussed how making our labs more digitally and technologically advanced, such as implementing video protocols, will aid in our research, making it more effective and quicker.  Now a new company called Digital Science (a new division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.) will focus on providing world-class software tools and services to principal investigators, scientists, and lab managers with the ultimate aim of making research more productive through the use of technology....

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