Me, myself and I

This is kind of a long update, but it covers everything I've been promising to tell you about since Christmas. Hope it's interesting, it's certainly been fun for me.


So, last term ended up being slightly busier than I’d planned. The science communication stuff has been going really well, I’ve been writing and editing, I did a bunch of talks and co-organised an unconference called SciBarCamb. Then there was the lab work and review essay as part of the PhD course. Plus, naturally, I had to get some baking in there and the intermediate massage course. Hopefully a bit more breathing space in the last term of the year.

Screening cake based on images from my project.

Full details of last terms project will be up shortly and will also be appearing on the Wellcome Trust blog as the next in my series for them describing my rotations. It’s been a lot of fun and I really enjoyed working with the lab, they are also very responsive to bribery by cake, which was very useful for me. That’s what resulted in screening cake. A set of cakes based on images from the yeast genomic screen we’ve been doing.

This time it's personal - A quick look at life beyond labbing (including pictures of DNA cake)

This has been sat on my computer since Friday and I've been meaning it post it, but got distracted by other things. It seems appropriate to post it now as I had quite a non-worky day, I had loads of end of term things to finish off, and managed to catch up with old friends both at lunch and at dinner.

Also, if anyone hasn't seen it, I wrote a post for the Lab Rat a few days ago. 

Last night was the lab Christmas dinner, so I thought I’d follow it up with a piece on the social side of my life. It is true that biological research can be quite demanding in terms of time. Sometimes you just have to be in the lab late night, early morning or at the weekends, to make sure the animals or cells you are working with stay healthy and to collect data. Thus it is very important to balance this with a healthy social life, something I have not always be great at.