 My lab has about 15 people or so and we're mostly interested in technology development so we are interested in developing tools that biologists can use to study biological problems and ideally we can develop powerful enough tools that the biologists are sort of enabled and empowered to learn things that they can learn without those tools so that's sort of the overview. And then right now we're doing an awful lot of mass spectrometry sort of 90 percent of the group is working on various sorts of mass spectrometry projects. Mass spectrometry being a method of weighing molecules with very high precision and you can get a lot of information about what the molecules are by weighing them in that way. The BTP program is important because it provides training and an environment to the students and resources, resource training and environment to the students that helps them develop better as scientists. So the resources are important because the funds then give the students more freedom than they might have if they were just funded by one grant that I might write on a particular topic so it gives them latitude to explore maybe different areas and maybe riskier areas and they might be able to explore under just one grant. Then the environment's important in that they have a cadre of other students who are also bright interdisciplinary and intelligent so they can learn from them and teach them. BTP program is set up with these like different things that you have to do, the course requirements, the course requirements in different fields, the internship, the seminar series, so all of that is set up in order to do a good job of training the students who come in that way. Science has changed really markedly just as predicted for the genome project in that it used to be people, it was like 90% bench work in biology and 10% messing around with computers and that's not quite flipped all the way but now it's sort of 50 or 60% computer work, informatics work, that kind of thing and much less bench work which is a really interesting transition and changes the way the students get trained. So you can see that in Leah for example, so Leah's coding all the time, she sits at her computer and she's working hard right now on software that we're developing to explore proteoforms which is really important part of the project and so that's nothing that just wouldn't have happened at all like 20 years ago. Hi I'm Leah Schaefer, I'm a second-year graduate student in Lloyd Smith's group in the Department of Chemistry and I'm a biotechnology training program trainee. So our group is developing technology to analyze proteoforms which are the different forms of a protein from a gene produced by splice variants or post-translational modifications. So these different forms of the protein in a cell can have completely different biological functions so in order to truly understand a biological system it's important to identify and quantify what proteoforms are present. So we are developing technology to identify proteoforms based on their intact mass. What I really like about the research in my lab is it involves both working in the wet lab and preparing samples and running them on the instrument but then I also get to work on a team in our lab of building the software that we get to use to identify proteoforms in our sample. So then when problems arise I can actually go into the software and figure out what's going on or if I have an idea of how to make a part of it better I can actually go in and fix it and it involves a lot of problem solving which is really fun so if something's not working trying to figure out where exactly it went wrong in either the program or the lab is a really fun part of the research.