Ten crews assemble on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s (CSHL’s) sand spit for the 9th annual CSHL Raft Race. Together, the rowers offer a snapshot of the Laboratory’s diverse community. As each takes to the water to await the starting horn, a crowd of friends, family, and coworkers arrives to cheer them on.
Each Raft Race is a showcase of the community’s creative, ingenious, and competitive spirit. It is one of CSHL’s great equalizers, featuring faculty, students, and staff from all walks of Laboratory life. They come together to compete in hand-built rafts for the honor of adding their name to the winners’ oar in CSHL’s Blackford Bar.
But when is a hand-built raft too much like one you’d expect to see in stores? This year, the Air-Water Interface crew, featuring members of CSHL’s Joshua-Tor lab, overcame new guidelines to take first place with a penalty-adjusted time of 9 minutes, 50 seconds. CSHL Assistant Professor Corina Amor Vegas and postdocs Joseph Gewolb and Alexander Harris crewed this year’s best-named raft. A CAR-T Full of Quacks was inspired by the Amor lab’s anti-aging research, which uses reprogrammed immune cells called CAR T cells.
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