Thank you for visiting this site. I have produced this web page to provide people with the opportunity to learn of new discoveries and advances in the life sciences.  Particularly, I am targeting individuals with less scientific background, but of course all are welcome to browse around this site.  To be honest, I will probably concentrate more on cancer-related and neurological-related research since that is what I am most interested in and most familiar with.  I wouldn't want to mislead anyone trying to explain recent advances in fields that I am not familiar with... that would be unfair to you.  

Great question.  Here you will find summaries of recent scientific articles from a number of prestigious journals; including Nature, Science, Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and EMBO Journal, just to name a few.  Now, most scientists have the resources to find these articles themselves, which is why I would like to target other individuals who may not be scientists but are still interested in science.  Further, if you do not have a strong scientific background, you may have difficulty reading and understanding these articles.  Therefore, I will summarize them on this site in plain English.  In other words, I will try to simplify the technical jargon as much as possible. 

I believe that it is important for scientists and non-scientists alike to be aware current developments in research.  For most non-scientists, that usually means picking up a newspaper or magazine, i.e. mass media.  It has been my experience that mass media may unintentionally distort the research to make it more exciting or more "news-worthy".  Further, they may be (understandably so) selective in what research to cover.  I do not have to worry about these concerns since it is free for me to run this site.  Thus, when I come across an article that I think may be interesting for you, I will summarize it on this site.  No flashy wording, no exaggerations, just straight understandable science.

Well, at the bottom of this page you will find a link to the next page.  On this next page you will find titles of the summaries (I would use the titles of the articles, but they can also be a bit difficult to understand) as well as the date and journal of the article.  If you click on the title of the summary, a new page will open up with the full citation of the article, my summary of the "important points", and a little section called "Why is this important to me?"

When I say "important points", I mean that I will not include the details of the article.  Again, this site is targeted for people who are not experts in the field and thus may not be interested in the method of transfection or how the kinase assay was performed.  Rather, I want people to get a sense of what is important from each article and why this is important.  That is the purpose of the "Why is this important to me" section.  In this section, I will provide a brief background to help place the findings of the article in perspective.  For example, if the article is about a particular aspect of cell cycle control, I will provide a brief introduction in the deregulation of the cell cycle that occurs in cancer.

Well, I'm a graduate student in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  Currently, I'm doing my doctoral thesis on the role of the Cdc42 signaling pathway in regulating cell cycle progression with Dr. Margaret Chou in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology.

More information?  Well, I'll direct you to my personal homepage for that!

Disclaimer:  I do not claim to be an authority on the material contained within this web site.  Rather, I only wish to provide an avenue for people who do not have the opportunity to read the primary literature themselves.  If you do find any mistakes or problems, or if you just have general comments and/or critiques, please feel free to e-mail me.  Thank you.

You are number at this site since September 2, 1999...Thanks!