Santiago R. Castillo
@SantiRCastillo
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PhD in Virology & Gene Therapy from @MayoClinic | Incoming postdoc at @CHOP_Research | Genome engineer 🧬 | Biomedical engineer 🦾 | Views are mine 🏳️🌈 🇨🇴
Philadelphia, PA
Joined June 2019
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Pinned Tweet
Why do people look for “highly motivated” postdocs? Sounds redundant, I don’t think you can get a PhD without being highly motivated.
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It’s insane that as a PhD student I have to go into personal debt to travel to a scientific conference, which is literally thousands of dollars, to present the work that I’ve done at an institution where PhD students are not seen as worthy of having corporate cards anymore.
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Got a full pass in my Oral Qualifying Exam! I’m a PhD candidate now!!! 🎉 🧬 🎈 🧪 🎊
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I’ve been doing whole-plasmid sequencing for $15/plasmid. Sanger sequencing costs $4/primer, and I typically sequenced a new construct with at least 4 primers ($16/plasmid). Why would I pay $16/plasmid for a fragment of the sequence when I can get the full sequence for $15?
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@Cas9Bandit
I will get reimbursed eventually. However, depending on how long the reimbursement takes, the debt might accrue interest, which becomes my responsibility. This policy also assumes that students have credit cards with high limits, which isn’t the case for everyone.
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Today I’m moving out of one of the nicest places I’ve ever lived in. After a 1 year lease they increased the rent while my PhD stipend stayed the same. I just can’t afford it anymore. Housing insecurity sucks.
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PhD thesis defense scheduled 📆 😏😏💪🏽 Officially becoming a doctor in two a half months 🧬🧬🧬👨🏽🔬
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@PepperPhD_MD
So that’s how the reagents that are older than the PhD students end up in every lab
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I wasn’t sure about posting this because of the stigma around it, but I’m feeling pretty damn good about my sobriety, so here it is.
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@Marcelo32832489
My institution literally gave us corporate cards. I had one from my 1st to my 4th year. Then the policy changed and they got rid of corporate cards for graduate students.
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@ravenscimaven
We’re currently in the star era, which will be followed by the black hole era. After the last black hole evaporates, everything will be darkness and time itself will virtually cease to exist.
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Just finished writing my first-author paper. Preprint coming soon…and hopefully publication coming soon as well. Stay tuned for some cool work on mtDNA editing ✏️ 🧬
#PhD
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Honored to have presented our work on mitochondrial base editing at SCGE. Second talk at a scientific conference as a PhD student! Shoutout to
@ankitsabharwal9
,
@BibekKar16
,
@yknowholic
,
@genetrapper
,
@scekker
, and all of the amazing people that have made this possible.
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@ivancedric_a
I stopped doing this a few months ago. I will say my full name the same way I would if I was in Colombia. It feels good
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Good morning Twitter! Can I get a happy birthday? 🥳 26 years on this beautiful blue rock.
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You know what. I’m a young gay man with lots of dreams, talents, ambition, and grit, and I deserve a healthy love story just as much as my straight peers.
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@sincerelysione
This tweet reminds me of that other tweet about a guy who sent a potential date his firs-author Nature paper.
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Me and the amount of times I had to quickly take extreme 180 degree pivots during my fancy PhD would like to respectfully disagree. Because, you know, if something just doesn’t work, you either hurry to make it work, or change projects while maintaining momentum.
No amount of fancy PhD'ing will help shake the academia out of you quite like an all hands meeting to discuss a massive necessary pivot. These will happen. Have alternative solutions in your pocket at all times. Practice tech failure fire drills with your team and drill often.
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Cell pellet of HEK293Ts transfected with a plasmid encoding green fluorescent protein (GFP, left) 🟢 vs. untransfected control (right) ⚪️ Simple but beautiful observation.
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@ThePhDPlace
Courtesy of my phone’s predictive text: I’m doing a PhD, but I can’t find any info about the process or how it is going on here so I’m just trying my luck.
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I just obtained the first piece of positive data for the project of my grant 😭 I would like to thank all the negative data that made this possible 😆
#PhD
🧬 ✂️
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Just got another scholarship to keep working on mitochondrial genome engineering 😳 🧬 ❌🧬 ✏️ 🧬 ✅
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Celebrated 10 months sober with a cafe miel ☕️ 🍯
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Excited for having received the 2021 Gateway to Mitochondrial Medicine Grant, funded by the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation. Funding will go towards the development of TALE-based technologies for mitochondrial genome editing.
#PhD
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I’m a bit late but here it goes. Today was the International Day of LGBTQIA+ People in STEM 🏳️🌈 My name is Santiago (he/him), I’m from Medellín, Colombia and I’m a gay scientist based in Rochester, MN. My research focus is on mitochondrial genome engineering! 🧬 ✂️
#LGBTQSTEMDay
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I recently got a virtual reality (VR) headset. One of the first things I did was watch a VR video of a human cell. Just wow. I literally watched a ribosome casually translating a piece of RNA right in front of me. Imagine learning biology like this! VR has so much potential.
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Our latest Ekker Lab paper - mitochondrial DNA editing in zebrafish. Expanding on the
@davidrliu
base editor, we adapted this to FUSX TALE assembly platform. This was led by
@ankitsabharwal9
and in collaboration with
@genetrapper
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I am not a US citizen (although I now live in the US), which is exactly why I can tell you that the US elections send a message to the entire world. Today, that message is that character matters, decency matters, empathy matters, being a good person matters!
#PresidentElectJoe
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My beloved dog of 15 years passed away last night. I can see now that I’ll never be able to go back to the home I left in Colombia when I came to the US more than two years ago. That place is lost in time, with Lucas’ barks, his bed, his bowls, and his toys all over the floor. ❤️🩹
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Dear experiments please just work this week thank you.
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Tomorrow I have my PhD oral qualifying exam and my COVID vaccine 😳
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It just hit me that I’m spending two whole weeks at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York starting tomorrow 😳
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@erinisaway
The older I get the more I realize that people view people as disposable and all relationships are transactional.
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I finally got my grad school GPA above 3.0! PhD-level courses on biochemistry, immunology, cell biology, and other related areas were incredibly challenging coming straight from an engineering degree in which I didn’t even take organic chemistry. I’ve definitely learned a lot.
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@andy_muan
I started in summer 2019. Had 6 months of COVID-free everything. Just a cruel glimpse of what could have been, but isn’t and never will be. But at least I’ll get to tell my grandkids that I did a PhD in virology during a global pandemic 🤷🏽♂️
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I just submitted my PhD thesis proposal! 😭 Not to brag but my project is cool cool. Also, I know it’s ridiculously late right now. I just didn’t wanna work during the last day of 2020 after waking up in the morning 🤷🏽♂️
#phdlife
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@INSColombia
La validez de un modelo depende de la cantidad de datos disponibles para alimentar el modelo, entre más datos reales se tengan a la mano, más acertado será el modelo.
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Still haven’t decided which lab to join for my PhD. I know that most, if not all except me, first years have already joined a lab, some even months ago. But I’ve decided to stop comparing my path to that of others. It’s my PhD after all.
#phdlife
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This month I was listed as a coauthor in two papers. They’re still preprints, but I’m so proud and happy! It’s my first time ever as a coauthor. Now it’s time to witness the peer-review process 😬
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We just published a review on mitochondrial base editing. Here, we summarize the current mtDNA editing toolbox and discuss its potential use to correct or model disease-associated mtDNA point mutations.
@BibekKar16
@ankitsabharwal9
@genetrapper
@scekker
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Human T cells before and after activation. I love seeing stuff I learned in textbooks happen before my eyes.
#cellfie
#immunology
#tcells
#phdlife
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Omg someone cited my undergraduate thesis 😱 This is actually my first citation ever 😳
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@klaussmouse
I had an undergrad mentor that told me that my work was useless. I proceeded to stop working with them and then got a research award for the same work, and used the monetary prize to apply to grad school. Now I’m a PhD candidate at Mayo Clinic (almost in my third year!)👨🏽🔬
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Working on yourself, your well-being, your relationships, your physical and mental health, is at least just as important as working on your career. The world needs more fulfilled and happy scientists, not just overworked and lonely scientists with long CVs.
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Got the First Runner-Up Award in my first-ever Three Minute Thesis Competition! 🤩 I talked about prokaryotic Argonautes and the quest for the next-generation genome editor ✂️ 🧬
#PhD
#phdlife
#threeminutethesis
#argonautes
#CRISPR
#geneediting
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I did a bunch of mitochondrial base editing experiments recently and I’m still mind blown by the fact that we can precisely change a single DNA letter in the mitochondrial human code 🧬 Doing the editing myself and seeing it very clearly in the data is just 🤯
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Scientific writing be like:
Pages: 2
References: 50
😳
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I just fully realized that I’m now actively engaged in both nuclear and mitochondrial genome editing research projects as part of my Ph.D. Since I was in high school I dreamed of being a genome engineer. That high school kid would be so proud 🥲
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Finally…
Classes ✅
Fellowship(s) ✅
Extracurriculars ✅
Now the only thing between me and my doctoral degree is a first-author paper 😤 Going into full focus mode
#PhD
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This is the picture I used this week to “officially” come out as a gay man to the entire grad school (plus friends and family that didn’t already know). In the description I made it very clear that I’m gay and proud af.
#LGBTQ
#gay
#visibility
#LGBTQfamily
#proud
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Not me having to submit my doctoral thesis in three weeks 😳 I can do it, I’ve been writing for months 😅 it just feels a bit unreal that the deadline is so close
#PhD
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@micro_Yasha
I was born and raised in ColOmbia (they didn't even spell it right)...what the heck is this person even talking about? "Souls to be saved and lives to be changed"? I'm not even mad, I'm literally just laughing😆 Hopefully they'll realize Colombia doesn't need them at all.
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@careerconversa1
I don’t like presenting the exact same poster at different conferences. I usually make adjustments based on feedback and progress inbetween conferences, so I end up changing the title but not just so it looks better but because it’s technically a different poster.
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I was at the park today having a socially distanced picnic with my lab, a very diverse group. An angry middle-aged white man approached us and started threatening to kill us all. After he left, my PI reported the incident to the police. Their first question: “Was he black?”
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Just presented what was hopefully the last journal club of my PhD 😌
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Has anyone tried Poster 2.0 layouts in their scientific poster presentations? What was your experience like? How did people react? I’m considering to use this format but it makes me anxious to think it will not go well.
@AcademicChatter
@AcademicDilemma
#betterposter
Meet the 2nd of 3 new
#betterposter
layouts: The Presenter. A quick, visual takeaway on the left. Then BIG key figures on the right with mini-takeaways above each figure. Download
@OSFramework
.
#OpenDesign
More in the BetterPoster2 cartoon: 🦄
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Simple and elegant study. The authors improve CRISPR-Cas12a systems by simply incorporating 2-aminoadenine (base Z) into the crRNA.
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I discovered a Brazilian cafe. Sou muito feliz 🙂
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@dr_alphalyrae
Aren’t PhDs constrained by the amount of time you have to complete the research? I would assume having a PhD actually means you can deliver under pressure, and do it in a timely manner
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Is the desire to question literally everything a side effect of doing a PhD? Like why do I have to cook my lasagna at 350 °F? What about 355 °F? What about oven-to-oven and lasagna-to-lasagna variation? What was even measured to determine the optimal temperature? 🤔 🤔 🤔
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No matter how hard things get, I have the tenacity of the human spirit, and I’m gonna finish this doctorate soon come what may.
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@AMLandryMD
Literally just because I saw that other people were doing it. I swear if enough of us just randomly started signing off emails with a totally random word like “House,” then other people would start doing it and it would become norm 😅
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I just got the best Christmas gift ever. My inner pianist couldn’t be happier 🎹
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This is my beloved dog, Lucas, who lives in Colombia. Tonight he’s hospitalized and fighting for his life. I miss him deeply 🖤
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@micro_Yasha
I’m Santiago, 1st year PhD student still trying to decide which lab to join (I know I will be doing something in the gene therapy field).
I have been trying out different facial masks 😅
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In times of added stress, I really feel the weight of living alone, having my family in some far away country, and being single.
#PhD
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Our paper on a platform for the rapid design and assembly of mtDNA base editors is now published (). This work is based on the first-ever mtDNA base editor developed by the Liu Group, as well as the FusX system for TALE assembly developed by the Ekker Lab.
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