Recently I discussed with colleagues on how to suggest reviewers when submitting our manuscript to journals. Here is a quick summary, and I would love to hear some feedback. 1. Suggest colleagues who are true experts in the area of our manuscript, who would be interested in learning more about our study. 2. Suggest colleagues who are friendly to us and respect our work in general. Some colleagues suggest taking advantage of the “Reviewers to be eliminated” section, although I haven’t used this very much. 3. Suggest colleagues who publish at similar levels or slightly lower levels of journals a ..read more

People say your habits determine your destiny. I have read many books on how important habits are, but the book Atomic Habits gives concrete advice on how to build good habits. There is already an excellent (online summary of Atomic Habits, and the online cheatsheet is also useful, so I will not elaborate more. Just want to share some experiences about trying their recommendations. 1. Try to do a little bit writing every night before bed, either writing a journal or a blog (hence I am restarting to blog again), even just for 2-10 min. 2. Try to do a few crunches after I brush my teeth everyday ..read more

Just came back from a wonderful Keystone epigenetic meeting. Here is a short blog on how to attend a conference (sorry don’t have time to elaborate more). It is challenging to follow all the suggestions, but I try to do as much as I can. 1. Submit an abstract to present 2. Check out conference schedules before 3. Sit in the front 1/5 of rows in talks 4. Take notes (main ideas, slide titles, papers to read, questions, speaker biography) 5. Ask at least one question every day in the public 6. Prepare a good presentation 7. Talk to as many new people as possible 8. Introduce yourself to speakers ..read more

It is hard to imagine that I haven’t written any blog for over a year now. It has been a crazy busy year, and I will try to catch up in the next couple of weeks. When I receive English emails from native Chinese speakers, they sometimes say “Please check it” which looks quite strange. Normally, when people say, “Please check something”, they are expecting an action from the receiver. E.g. check the user manual to follow the correct instructions, check your answers to find a mistake, check the car to make sure there is nothing wrong, check the medications to prevent a mixup, so in Chinese it pr ..read more

I want to share some of my experiences balancing work and life and keeping our house organized. From the book “The life-changing magic of tidying up”, I learned a few things. Throwing away things I don’t use any more is the most important way to declutter, so only keep things that give me joy. A rule to decide whether to throw something away is to ask, “if I were to buy this thing at its current state, would I pay for it?” If not, then throw it away. For everything I keep, it needs to have a designated place in the house. Recently, we started a cleanup routine in the kitchen. At the end of din ..read more

I wrote this blog about 3 years ago, but never got to post it. Here it is: I have been to several very interesting conferences in the last year. During many talks, I diligently took notes (I love Evernote) and downloaded relevant papers which I planned to read afterwards. However, upon returning from these conferences, I often had to deal with work that got piled up during my absence, and by time the crunch was over, the notes and papers to be read are forgotten. At AACR, Myles Brown went to Rick Young‘s talk where Rick presented their in press Cell paper on super-enhancers. I immediately thou ..read more

Over the years, I have an increasing appreciation of the cost effectiveness of tumor RNA-seq for precision cancer medicine research and clinical utility. From TCGA tumor profiling, scientists have tried different clustering methods, from DNA mutations, mRNA-seq, miRNA expression, DNA methylation, and RPPA (proteomics). Although they often give different clustering results, the most informative in consensus clustering modeling of all the information together and tumor subtype classification is still probably RNA-seq. Of course, we can also learn a lot better how genes are differentially regulat ..read more

During the Christmas and New Year holidays, I read two books: The Miracle Morning and The One Thing. I tried to combine their recommendations in my daily activities, and the results have been quite impressive. I will start by explaining the The Miracle Morning first, which encourages people to establish a morning routine. There is a recommended routine, but the author encourages people to try different things to find something that fits them well. So here is mine: 1. Before going to bed at night, be determined to get up at a certain time in the morning. Depending on the time I go to bed, I dec ..read more

In the last decade, Chinese government has drastically increased investment in education and research. One important initiative is the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) which sponsors graduate students to study for 1-2 years at top foreign research institutions. Our laboratory has hosted a number of talented visiting students, many of which achieved impressive research results during their visits. In Dec and Jan right before these scholarship applications are due, I often receive many email requests from candidates. Quite a few read something like this: Dear Professor Xiaole Liu, My name is AB ..read more

Recently, as I was looking up some answers to an immunology question, I came by this great YouTube Playlist of 35 short immunology videos by Armando Hasudungan. I will certainly be viewing all of these lectures! From there, I also found the Aims Education list of 7 good BioMedical YouTube sites. Over the years working at DFCI, I have grown to admire doctors more and more, at least the Harvard MDs that I have worked with. I have meant to take some courses to learn more about medicine, such as the Harvard Medical School crash course to help physicians prepare for the board exam, but really haven ..read more