What did you find unique about the Coon group?

I came to UW-Madison to work with Josh Coon, since I knew about his work and wanted to do mass spectrometry instrumentation, as well. But I was not anticipating the level of attention to detail in various aspects of our careers and research, which I think may be unique to the Coon group.

For me, probably the most important aspect of this attention was mentoring, especially in terms of career development. While I was in the Coon group and even now as I continue in my career, moving from a post-doc to a professorship, I’ve benefited from so much career support. Coon sends students to a lot of conferences and finds them speaking engagements (more-so than other labs), which helped me gain a lot of confidence in networking.

There’s also a unique outside-the-box approach to science in the Coon lab that had a way of training our attention on things we might otherwise have looked over. A strong collaboration with industry helped us acquire funding outside of governments grants, for example. And, another feature of the mentoring culture, we learned to put intense effort into writing and data visualization. I think good data visualization is an underappreciated aspect of high-throughput biology, and being able to do it well has helped me a lot in my genomics post-doc.

Besides attention to detail, I think the Coon group is a uniquely tight-knit and supportive group. I still see and talk to the people who I spent my years with there regularly.