Mad Scientist Recipes

Each week, everyone in my biomedical research lab comes together for a meeting. At this "lab meeting," we discuss technical issues or upcoming events in the lab and a trainee presents his/her recent data. These informal presentations are a forum for my fellow graduate students and me to get feedback about our experiments, troubleshooting suggestions, and ideas for the next step with our thesis work. It is also the place where our mentor will randomly test our knowledge and ask us questions about biology, just to keep us on our toes. Since our meeting is in the morning, the person (or people) presenting will bring a breakfast treat to share with the lab. For me, I like to get creative and combine my love of baking with my passion for pulmonary research. I start looking at recipes a week ahead of time to try and make delicious muffins, breads, cakes, or cookies that relate to a scientific concept or health issue. I often bake things related to my research project, which is investigating the effects of exposure to biomass smoke from cooking fires. I've made "lung on a chip" (chocolate covered potato chips with lungs made of either Oreo truffles or icing), 3-stone (a.k.a. cadbury egg) fire peanut butter muffins, pulmonary circulation sweet potato bread, cookstove cupcakes (see picture below), and more. If you want to try some cool science themed recipes and/or learn a little bit about lung diseases, check out the cookbook ("Lung-on-a-Chip" and More Mad Scientist Recipes) that my friends and I put together at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9jdg-QyDgxHdkNkR0k3VGdkU28/view?usp=sharing.