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During the summer the interns went on field trips to visit labs and campuses all around the Bay Area. We visited Novartis in Emeryville, UC Berkeley, The QB3 Institute/University of California San Francisco and UC Berkeley and the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek.

Novartis

The first field trip was to the Novartis (formerly Chiron) labs in Emeryville. We visited the oncology research and protein expression laboratory, learned about bioinformatics and drug development. We also toured the baculovirus expression facility and saw the giant wave tanks where they grow insect cells.

UC Berkeley

We started out on an official tour of the Berkeley campus and learned about some of the buildings, and the history of the campus. Then we went on an 'unofficial tour' with Tonya who was a student at Berkeley- she really gave us the inside scoop. Finally, we visited with students from the Biology Scholars Program and learned about their experiences at Berkeley and the BSP program.

QB3/UCSF

This was the best tour of the summer. We headed over to San Francisco by BART and then piled into taxis and headed to the Mission Bay campus of UCSF and the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3). We toured the brand new laboratories and were impressed by the design. We learned that the open lab space and common areas were designed to facilitate interactions among the researchers in different laboratories. We also met (and dined with) some graduate students who told us about how they came to be in graduate school and about their research projects. We learned that people come to science from many different paths and that graduate school is challenging and fun.

Joint Genome Institute

The last tour of the summer was to the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek. After an introduction to genome sequencing we toured the sequencing facility and saw all of the machines that enable the JGI to churn out and millions of base pairs of sequence. We met the high school interns from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and competed against them in a genome assembly exercise.