Preprint coming soon!

In the next couple of days I'll be posting a link to a preprint of a paper I am about to submit to the Journal of Theoretical Biology (with my coauthors: Masoum, Charisse, Dan and Kel). Stay tuned. :-)

A new feeling

It is getting closer to the time when one of my PhD students will be submitted her completed thesis. This particular student is the first for whom I have been principal supervisor, so this realisation is certainly leading to a new feeling for me. I'm excited for her to be reaching this point. I'm nervous for her and myself as she will go through a rather gruelling period of judgement, first by her supervisors and then by a small panel of internationally recognised experts in the field.

It's great to see the thesis document itself starting to take shape. It really is amazing to see its transformation from a collection of loose ideas, somewhat formalised, into a story that weaves its way through a relatively unexplored topic area, adding to knowledge, tying thoughts and hypotheses together.

The way we have worked through this PhD candidature has involved now publishing journal articles along the way. Not on purpose, but that's just the way it has worked out. So now that the thesis is coming together, we are also starting to simultaneously put together numerous (well, three) journal articles. I'm kind of a sucker for this part...I just love to see work I've played a role in appearing in the formally recognised way. Most supervisors probably push their students to do the menial tasks of fixing up figures and putting the work into the template of the journal, but I love doing that part personally. So I'm having a lot of fun with this.

Still, there's more hard work to be done...so we better get back to it.

Lameness

I'm doing something totally cliche - cooking blog. Check it out if you are keen...else not :-)

http://hungryenough.blogspot.com/

Losing contact

Losing contact in an email back-and-forth is embarrassing. Especially when you don't actually know the person and you start off very keen, but then die off.

This has happened to me with a contact I made serendipitously via another contact in New Zealand. I don't even really know the NZ contact. We've met once years ago at a modelling workshop. She is a pharmaceutical researcher and was trying to get some models built for what, in my opinion anyway, is a simple diffusion across a membrane issue. I think she agreed, but the rest of our group was hell bent on some differential equation based nonsense that was clearly inappropriate for something that was clearly a spatiotemporal process! Anyway, that common ground left us as occasional emailers to each other. This year I hope to visit her in NZ - probably in June.

Anyway, she introduced me to another research - a material scientist who constructs drug delivery devices - from Northern Ireland. I am really interested to work with this guy because he is interested in similar things to above, but also because he actually understands applied mathematics, probably better than me too.

I contacted him late last year and we tried to set up a phone meeting (who uses the phone anymore? honestly!)...but various things got in the way: winter storms in Belfast, Brisbane floods, then my holidays and numerous overseas trips.

I looked in my email and noticed his last email to me was February 8 - 3 months ago!!! I hastened to send a reply this morning in order to reestablish contact and set up a phone call for this coming week. Hopefully he hasn't lost interest :-)