The light at the end of the Ph.D. tunnel....

Most of you know that I (Tom) am an MD/PhD student in the Department of Chemistry and Medical Scholars Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I passed some major milestones in my PhD. career the last few weeks. On Oct. 23 - Mole Day - our paper was finally published (web version) in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. You can see the abstract here. Here's our nifty abstract image:

The white discs have chemicals that we are testing for anti-fungal activity (see below)

I'm not allowed to post the pdf, otherwise I would. But if you are on campus of an educational or research institution, you can probably view the pdf here. Basically, we we work with an antifungal drug called amphotericin B that is used clinically for severe fungal infections. However, it is quite toxic to the kidneys. We chemically "amputated" part of the molecule that is supposed to be critical for the drug to work. Surprisingly, it was still able to kill fungus cells. This result has potential implications for designing a less toxic drug and also suggests that the drug doesn't necessarily work the way everyone thought it did for the last 40 years. So, it's pretty exciting for us! (even if you find it painfully boring....) Here's a picture of me with my advisor, Marty Burke, and my colleague Dan Palacios (an older, more entertaining picture of Dan can be found here - keep hitting refresh until he comes up!):

Dan has some killer hair.

In other news, I had my "prelim" exam which is basically the equivalent of defending a master's thesis, although I don't formally get a master's in my program. I defended my research in front of 4 faculty members and they asked me all sorts of questions for an hour and a half and I passed. Which means that I now have grad school "tenure" for the rest of the PhD process (i.e. they can't kick me out!). So I'm officially a Ph.D. candidate. It's definitely a load off, but it was kind of anticlimactic. Dan also recently passed his prelim, and another group member, Eric Gillis, also just published a paper. My advisor was so happy about all of this that he took us all out to dinner at Texas Roadhouse and then we went back to his house for drinks (I had sparkling cider...everyone else did not).