Thank you, Neerja

Neerja Hajela has worked with me for over 22 years as a technician and lab manager. She is extremely skillful, diligent, organized, and dedicated in her work. On top of all that, she is a wonderfully kind and warm person. Now, this is her last week before she retires.

It’s impossible to put into words all that Neerja has done for me, for everyone in the lab, for the LTEE, and for my collaborators. But let me mention a few of the things she has done.

By keeping the lab running in a smooth and orderly fashion, Neerja has enabled me to spend more of my time thinking about science, writing papers, giving talks, etc., etc. We scientists sometimes complain that we have too much to do, and so we joke that we want to clone ourselves. Well, I’ve done better—I’ve had Neerja.

Those of us with labs know that our institutions take laboratory safety very seriously, as well they should. Neerja runs such a tight ship that, on many occasions after inspecting our lab, the safety officers have made comments to the effect that they wish all labs were as neat, clean, organized, and safety-conscious as ours.

One of the challenges of the long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) with E. coli is freezer management. We now have over 30 years of samples, spread over half a dozen freezers, which provide a record of past evolution. Neerja has overseen this ever-growing collection with extraordinary care and dedication. The samples provide critical backups that allow us to restart the LTEE from a recent milestone when mishaps occur, and they provide unique research materials such as when new technologies emerge. A case in point: Michael Desai wrote me a few years ago with a request. In essence, he wanted all of the LTEE samples for metagenomic sequencing. All of them—from each population and every generation with saved samples. Since I started the LTEE in 1988, we’ve always saved duplicate samples, with one of them being a backup to be opened only in an emergency. I could send Michael the backups, perhaps, but that didn’t seem like a good idea. So I decided we should make additional sets by going into the ~1500 key samples spread over several freezers; taking a subsample of each and culturing it to produce a larger sample; splitting the new culture into ten sub-cultures; and freezing those to provide a new set for Michael as well as other sets for collaborators and institutions. It took Neerja many months to accomplish all of this, but as always, she did it with great skill and care. (Oh, and you can read about the results of Michael’s request here.)

Last, but surely not least, Neerja has done more of the daily transfers of the LTEE than anyone else. She performed her first LTEE transfer on February 5, 1996, and since then she has done well over 4,200 daily transfers. (Thanks to Zachary Blount, who went through the LTEE lab notebooks for its 30^th birthday.) And when Neerja hasn’t done the transfers herself, she has organized who else is responsible for each and every day’s transfers.

Thank you, Neerja, for all that you have done for me, for everyone in the lab, for the LTEE, and for science. Everyone in the lab joins me in wishing you and Ravindra all the very best in your retirement and new home!

 

[Neerja Hajela]

[Here’s Neerja doing yesterday’s LTEE transfer]

[Neerja pointing at two of her LTEE entries: her first transfer on February 5, 1996, and the one from yesterday July 30, 2018. The lab notebooks in the background record the daily transfers since she joined the lab.]

[Close-up of Neerja’s first entry.]

[Neerja’s protocols for the LTEE, mounted in the lab, so nobody makes a mistake]

[And in case that doesn’t work, here’s Neerja enforcing lab discipline]

[The LTEE transfer board from earlier this year]

[Horsing around Tanush’s plate tower]

[Neerja making copies of freezer samples]

[Neerja and me]