Travel
I'm Sam Schulman (Sam Desmond Schulman), a PhD student in Integrative Biology at LSU New Orleans. Science has taken me a long way from New Orleans, and this page keeps track of where.
EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, England
- Introduction to Metabolomics AnalysisApr 27 – May 1, 2026 EMBL-EBI, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, near Cambridge, UK
In spring 2026 I spent a week at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, just south of Cambridge, for the course Introduction to Metabolomics Analysis. I was one of 30 participants selected from around the world.
The trip was funded by my AGE VOYAGER award from the American Aging Association, which covered all of my expenses. The course has a competitive application, and my advisor, Dr. Cheng Shi, wrote a letter of support.
What I learned
Metabolomics measures the small molecules a cell is actually using at a given moment. Over the week we worked through liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS), mass spectrometry imaging, the MetaboLights database, and building analysis workflows in Galaxy.
For my own research, this is the next step. I study how the worm C. elegans survives sudden heat and cold, and untargeted metabolomics will let me see which metabolic pathways shift under that stress instead of studying one gene at a time.
Poster
I presented a poster at the course: icl-1 and trehalose in acute stress survival in C. elegans.
The place
The Wellcome Genome Campus is a landmark in biology: nearly a third of the human genome was sequenced there, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Walking into that campus as someone who came to science after years in construction and food service is something I won't forget.