New Orleans

At the end of this month I will be venturing to New Orleans to attend the American Crystallographic Association conference. This is a research conference that happens every year; last year that I attended the same conference in Chicago. The main goal of these kinds of conferences is to disseminate knowledge gained through research. This dissemination is usually done through two kinds of presentations, oral presentations and poster presentations. Just about every student that goes presents a poster. If the research that you propose to present is good and of general interest they will pick you to give a talk.

So, how does one propose a research presentation? That is done by submitting an abstract, which is a short synopsis of your research. My lab mate and I submitted our abstracts a few months back. The conference organizers will typically tell you well in advance that your abstract has been accepted and what kind of presentation you’d be giving, which is a poster presentation 95% of the time. It occurred to me last week that the conference was right around the corner and I had yet to hear from the conference. I got worried when someone informed me that they had tried to email me but it had not gone through. Was I sent an email from the conference but didn’t get it? So I sent an email to the conference organizers explaining my predicament.

While I was waiting for a reply, I went to the conference website and noticed that they had published the conference program. If my abstract had been accepted my name would appear in my program. The list of posters was quite extensive, as such, I searched for my name using the browser’s find function. My name came up not under posters but rather under talks. That’s right, I have been assigned to give a talk.
The talk will be 15 minutes long and I will mostly be talking about work that my mentor did. She was on an international task force whose job was to recommend validation methodologies that will be incorporated into the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The PDB is where all published protein models have to be deposited. Everybody is interested in this topic as everybody wants to have a model that looks good and thus will p ass as a good structure using the new validation techniques. I will also be presenting some of my research.

So there you have it, my exciting news. As a side note, I will be in Utah from June 29 to July 19. I cannot wait to see everybody!

Die tree, die!!

The past month has been pretty quiet. I have been getting ready for my initial committee meeting. This meeting is deigned to introduce my committee to myself but more importantly my project. For those who are unfamiliar with the process of getting a PhD this committee is made up of faculty members who will follow me throughout my tenure as a graduate student. Their job is to ensure that I am doing the things that I need to receive a PhD. Finally, at my dissertation defense I ‘defend’ my research to them. To get ready for the initial meeting one must prepare a short summary on my the research that I propose doing and prepare a very short presentation. I have also, of course, been continuing with my research. As usual in research, it is going slowly but going nonetheless.

This week I had the opportunity to go see a performance put on by the Young Ambassadors of BYU. Their program included singing and dancing. The performance followed the ideal life; childhood, adolescence, marriage, adulthood and growing old. They were very good at what they did…suffice it to say it reminded me of Saturday’s Warriors.

Unfortunately, the only biking that I get in is my daily commute to and from lab. I’d like tpo do more but another activity has taken priority, working in the yard. Yesterday I started to take down a tree in the backyard. A vicious vine was overtaking this tree, it was a matter of time before the vine would kill the tree. It also was in the way any time that I wanted to take out the garbage or mow the lawn. I was only able to take down half of it as there was only so much room in our yard waste bins; I’ll do the rest next week.

That’s it for now.