long time, no blog...again

Ok first things first, link to the promised paper preprint...feel free to check it out. I submitted it to the Journal of Theoretical Biology about a week after the previous post. It's currently under review.

Now, I've been away from the blog for a while but for good reason. I have been working my arse off on some grant applications. This is my first time doing this in any serious way. I've been third CI on an ARC discovery application a couple of years back, but didn't really contribute anything and we didn't get the grant anyway. Years back I applied for an Australian Learning and Teaching Council grant and didn't get that either...so I'm counting these last couple of weeks as my first real serious effort at getting funded. That said, I completely expect that neither of them will be funded!

ALTC - Discipline Network

The first one is an application for a national learning and teaching network for the mathematical sciences. The Australian Learning and Teaching Council has been shut down by the Commonwealth Government, but before they close completely they are splashing all these grants around in the hope that the work they've done already will continue. One scheme is to set up national, discipline based L&T networks. I'm leading an application with some folk from JCU, Newcastle, UTS, Wollongong, UWS and with support from the Australian Maths Society and Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute to set up a network for mathematics. It's only for $100,000 over 2 years, but it could see some nice initiatives for recognition and sharing of excellent teaching practice get off the ground. It's due Tuesday...almost there.

Learning experience: I'm not really one to work with other people. I hate it actually. But I went extra hard at it for this application. I essentially cold called about 30 people including the president of AustMS and Director of AMSI as well as various academics who have never heard of me. It was awkward, but worked out well in the end. Lots of support for the idea and now I have a fairly large team of interested people coming along on the journey in the hopes of getting the $$$.

US Dept of Defence - Prostate Cancer


So it turns out the the US Army funds medical research! Most of it is for clinical, experimental type stuff, but they had this one opportunity listed for "innovative" projects that "explore hypotheses". They DISCOURAGED data and/or experiments. So I put together an application based around the concept of in silico (computational/mathematical) modelling and experimentation to inform laboratory experiments prior to actually running them, or to improve them when they are already completed. I did the awkward "approach people to be involved" thing again, and it worked out pretty well again! Yay for self-improvement.

This would be for $70,000US for a one year project...basically it would hire a postdoc researcher for a little while to get some work done. Hopefully with a view to building up a more serious project that could get more, longer funding.

The learning experience here was the pain of the admin side of the application. I ended up having to make 16 separate pdf files for parts of the application as well as a fill it in as you go pdf form from the US gov't grants system which was an absolute pain in the ass.

Research postgraduate students seminar day


Yesterday we had our annual research students seminar day. From memory, way back, this used to be a day when ALL of our research students gave talks. But these days we have about twice as many students, so only a few actually get/have to speak.

I know that most of the people who read this are research students or were once, so I'll say a couple of things more about this. First I used to find it boring as hell. Now, not so much. I'm even interested in the talks from students who I can't understand the work of. Next, I know some of you worry about giving talks - don't - seriously...look around - some people give absolutely shit talks, but it doesn't matter.  Chances are you are doing good work. Don't get so concerned about looking good, or people thinking you are doing something hard or easy or whatever. KNOW that you are doing something good! Then just tell everyone about it. I think some of you do this and it really shows in how relaxed you are and how the point gets across so much easier. Just talk to everyone like you are telling them your story!

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Well, less than two months to go. I need to get more papers finished.... I need to get working on a book.... and I need to help my research students more...! That's all for now.

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 :-)

Days 3-4 ho chi minh city

So here we are with some more food photos. We've been eating a lot of food here so that's mostly what you see in the photos! We ventured around the corner into an area which was a bit euro trashy if you ask me. Actually, it reminded me a lot of Amsterdam. Lots of white folk, lots of artificial Asia and tourist trap type stuff. Anyway, we went into this dodgy looking restaurant - not dodgy in the good, poor people eat here and this is good food, way, but dodgy in the we just can't be bothered because we know cheap Europeans will come in here and eat eventually. Really though it still wasn't that bad. Chaz got this lovely number - some sort of eggplant, onion and a tonne of garlic combo. Looked alright, I don't eat eggplant though so I can't say one way or the other.

I had another strange beef in tomato stuff soup stew type thing which you can see above. It tasted fine and I actually enjoyed it although most of the beef was a massive hunk of inedible fat. I'm pretty sure it messed with my stomach in a bad way though. I washed it down with a 500ml Saigon for around 55c though so that felt pretty good (shown below). We left this joint soon after though.

I think it was that night that the little guy wasn't feeling well so we actually ate room service. Below is my chicken rice soup which was quite tasty and extremely filling. Then you'll see Chaz's spaghetti bolognese. Strangely they do really good spaghetti here for some reason?

In a crazed fit of tourism we went and visited both w catholic church and the HCMC post office. I felt like a regular 60 year old retiree for a while there :P this was little Dan after triumphantly climbing the steps to some statue outside the post office. He keeps telling us how hot it was there every time he sees these.

Not a great photo I know, but I just liked this sunset the other day.

This next pic shows one of the many aerobics sessions that goes on at the park across from our hotel every day. They actually start around 5 in the morning and have a few morning sessions then start again around 5.30 in the evening. People just seem to join in. There's this flashy one where the leader stands on a big table and then there are some other smaller ones hidden away under the trees. Actually there is a lot of exercise going on over there most of the day. A little part of me likes to think romantically that this is a remnant of the more disciplined and serious communist era when maybe activity like this was compulsory. I don't know if that is true though. I also get this constant reminder of when mr burns makes all the SNPP workers start exercising at the plant. "6 hi-ya-ya". Love it. Little Dan also loves going to the park for a run. I'm sure Chaz will post some of the photos of me and Dan running through 23/9 somewhere else.

Photos - day 1-2

This is the view out the window of our hotel (Vien Dong) across park 23/9. You can see the park itself below. Last night there were young guys playing soccer on the bitumen and lots of people doing aerobics. Today it was mostly dog walking and badminton (often without a net!).

On our walk up to the end of the park I was fortunate enough to wander along with this beautiful character often referred to as "my wife".

We ended up at the Ben Thanh market - here's some of the seafood area. Probably a redundant statement given that I grew up in Ipswich but I have never seen so many types of fish in my life. Lots of different shellfish and crabs and prawns too. The women were gutting the eels and fish in front of us - fresh as!

This was a few blocks down the road from our hotel. Crossing the road seems daunting but isn't really that bad. It actually sort of reminds me of Swiss pedestrian crossing - you need to show an element of intent, an element of fearlessness and an element of ignorance all of which need to be obvious enough for the drivers and riders to see. Then you are fine. Just walk - whenever!

Snapped this guy tapping out a text on his bike when we were driving in from the airport.

This was my first pho (with accompaniments above) in vietnam. Hopefully one of many. Yay pho!!!!

First dinner - bun cha tay ho. This was the one with the cheetoh meatballs. Yuuuummmy.