Category Archives: Uncategorized

This week I’m at the biennial meeting of the International Society of Microbial Ecologists (ISME) in Seoul.  During lunch yesterday there was a special “bird’s eye view” talk given by Dr. James Prosser, a preeminent microbiologist from the University of … Continue reading →

Doctoral dissertations typically include an introduction, a Chapter 1 that summarizes the work and the motivation for undertaking it.  Last week I submitted my dissertation to the UW and the introduction, which includes citations from some long-ago work on psychrophiles … Continue reading →

Pending the (hopeful) defense of my dissertation on August 8th I’ll be starting a postdoc at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.  Since there’s generally a little downtime between turning in a thesis and defending it I’ve migrated this … Continue reading →

I’m not a modeler, but I played one once in grad school. Or at least that’s how I’m feeling at the moment. I’m currently working on the last chapter of my dissertation and it became necessary to explore the mechanisms … Continue reading →

As mentioned in my previous post I spent the last three days at the AAAS-CASE workshop in Washington, DC.  The purpose of the workshop was to introduce junior scientists to the legislative process and the ins and outs of science … Continue reading →

I’m currently in Washington, DC for the pilot AAAS-CASE (Catalyzing Advocacy and Science in Engineering) workshop.  I wanted to share a great short video that was sent to the attendees before the workshop. http://www.innovationdeficit.org/ The video describes the “innovation deficit”, … Continue reading →

Speaking of the UW Oceanography Bioinformatics Seminar… one of the seminar participants just sent around a Plos Computational Biology that lists a complete curriculum’s worth of free online bioinformatics courses.  Some of the courses are more suitable for computer scientists … Continue reading →

Everyone’s impacted by the shutdown in the federal government in some way.  First and foremost are federal employees, including research scientists at NOAA, NASA, and the other research-minded federal agencies.  Not only are these individuals locked out of their workplaces, … Continue reading →

Traditionally there were three ways that, having acquired a PhD, a researcher could continue with their scientific career: 1)  Seek a faculty job at an academic institution (typically a university).  University jobs are wonderful in that they allow for complete … Continue reading →

The polar research community was reminded of the risks in polar research yesterday with the news that a helicopter crash had killed two Canadian Coast Guard officers, including the commander of the venerated research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, and scientist Klaus … Continue reading →