Why the long silence?

The past year was a year of transitions. The fall semester was not bad in terms of transitions as hard as it could've been. However, there were many transitions unforeseen for the spring semester. Those spring semester transitions brought the majority of the research in my lab to a halt.

The biggest accomplishments for me during the year were not so much what happened at the bench insomuch as they were successes in the classroom (i.e., the spring semester transitions). One of the biggest accomplishments in the classroom was that I developed an entirely new course on Microbial Pathogenesis. We used the book by Abigail Salyers by the same name and really enjoyed going over the material. The material had been on my mind since I had graduated from graduate school. It was good to go as in depth on the topic since it had been a long while. My passions for the topic were reignited and flourished. The freshness on the topic will serve me well as I teach that course again this upcoming semester. I also had the time to go back over many of the lectures that I had given the previous semester and had a chance to polish them, which was another significant update given how many lectures that was.

In terms of another outside accomplishment for the department, we were able to put together a master's degree for the first time. The goal is to implement this degree the upcoming fall semester and I am so excited to train graduate students again. I'll have the opportunity to teach some more new classes--some will be brand new to me and others will be more of what I'm used to. Among my new responsibilities will include teaching the graduate seminar. I am extremely excited to organize the list of outside speakers to come to our department to give talks. The talks will include the areas of exercise science and microbiology (which reflect the research interests within the department). Right now, I am building a list of speakers and I think it is going to have a strong impression on the new students coming.

I've got some new ideas on how to go about developing these new graduate classes and I'm looking forward to implementing these new ideas. Not completely sure how they will work, but I'm looking forward to unpacking them for the first time--I really think that it will be a nice way to train graduate students for entering Ph.D. work.

I'm also excited that there will be lab rotations with our new master's program, which I never actually participated in... even as a graduate student myself. This will be a whole new endeavor and I cannot wait for it to get started. Part of writing this new blog is one way that I'm hoping to provide a fresh restart on this research web site for the new school year.

Plans on research will largely include finishing up the construction for the complemented qseC mutant for the unpublished paper. I'm toying around with a few ideas on how to get the graduate students' feet wet as they enter the lab; I'm even having some literal dreams about the experiments. Once the qseC mutant has been finished and resubmitted for publication, I'm thinking of getting back to the fossil record for further characterization of the E. coli MG1655, HS, and Nissle motility for another paper. If everything goes right, the first graduate student rotating through the lab could get their name on a paper before finishing the rotation!

Ultimately, I'm really looking forward to just getting all the experiments up and running this upcoming fall semester. Looking forward to reuniting with the undergraduate that I was training and hitting the bench hard.