Backpacking Bryce Canyon

I went to Bryce Canyon with my good friend, Christopher, to go on my obligatory summer backpacking trip. I think that backcountry backpacking is my favorite thing in the world. We left Sandy at 4AM to ensure that we caught the park shuttle to the other end of the park, to Rainbow Point. The plan was to take the ‘Under the Rim trail.’ This is a one-way 23-mile trail that extends through the entire park, almost. The problem with backpacking here is water; there are only two reliable water sources, that is the two places we camped. The first day was rather simple; from where we were dropped off, at Rainbow Point, we only had to go 4 miles to our campsite (Iron Spring). Shortly after we got there it started to rain. Considering that we were in the desert, it was a pretty healthy rain but short lived. There was a reliable water source, Iron Spring, but it had lots of minerals and silt in it the clogged the filter rather quickly. We hiked up close to the top of the ‘rim’ where there were some pretty neat rock formations. We then went down to where we heard water flowing and followed it up to find what I’m sure was the head of Iron Spring. Unfortunately fires are not permitted in the park so when night came we didn’t spend too much time talking, we went to bed rather quickly as it got fairly cold. A strange thing that I will not forget is the quiet that accompanied the night at Iron Spring. There was no wind, no crickets, no noise at all; it was kind of eerie.

The second day was a lot more grueling than either of us had expected. We had to go 13 miles to our next campsite. We had thought, ‘yeah, we can do 13 miles, no problem.’ It was almost as if we had failed to figure in the fact that we had 35 LBS on our backs. We started around 10:30 AM and didn’t get to camp until 7:30 PM. This stretch of the trail had no water to speak of. We had filled all our water at Iron Spring, it turned out that that amount was barely enough to carry us through the 13 mile trek. We were dead when we finally made it to the second campsite, Yellow Creek. There was another group at this site from Belgium. Luckily the ‘creek’ was right next to camp. After we filled our water bottles, we cooked dinner, setup camp, and went to bed. It was a very grueling day and we were exhausted!

The next day we took it easy and stayed around camp to allow our bodies to recover. We spent time talking, diverting the creek, damning the creek, bathing, etc. At one point we decided to follow the creek upstream. Well, the bugs up river had another idea. We got to one point where then coordinated an attack on us, it was horrible! So we quickly got away from the creek and made our way back to camp. The next day we packed up camp and walked the last six miles to Bryce Point. This was a very different portion of the trail. We went through a desolate sagebrush field, thick scrub oak, and finally a steep accent to Bryce Point. The accent was neat as we finally got to see those strange hoodoo formations that Bryce Canyon is famous for. We made it back, took the shuttle to the car, and drove back to Sandy.

All and all, it was a great backpacking trip. This was very different from the backpacking trips that I usually take as it was in the desert. Luckily it was the high desert so it never got too hot. Christopher and I had a great time together; it was just the two of us. I’ll have to find a new partner for next year as Christopher will be on his mission.

View from Rainbow Point, the start. We followed those cliffs that you see in the distance.

Starting Down the trail. (me)

Starting Down the trail. (Topher)

Pink cliffs, no pink ladies though :(

A cool chasm!

On the trail.

Starting to get in the hoodoos on the last trail.

Getting to the end of the trail. (me)

Getting to the end of the trail. (Topher)

Getting to the end of the trail. (random hoodoos)

6-27-2011 Bike Ride

As my last ride for my three week vacation to Utah I did my 'Mama Bear' loop. 'Baby Bear', my 20 mile loop, was getting all my attention. Mama bear is almost 28 miles. Maybe in August I'll introduce you to 'Papa Bear'. Side Note: according to this site, I am burning as many calories on this ride as a healthy individual exercising three times a week should intake. No wonder I am ALWAYS hungry!!

6-20-2011 Bike Ride

I am now biking three times a week. I usually do my 18 mile loop. If you include my ride into lab its actually 20 miles.

ACA 2011

I spent this last week in New Orleans at the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) conference. I was there with my awesome lab mate and new roommate, Christopher. This is the same conference that I went to in Chicago last year. The conference happened two months earlier this year due to the international crystallography conference that happens this summer. The ACA conference is meant to get scientist in the crystallography community together to share their research. This really is a prime way to learn what others are doing, develop ‘research relationships’, and bounce ideas off one another. I feel that these conferences are an essential component to scientific discovery.

Getting to New Orleans happened to be a bigger deal than one would have anticipated, but we had a few lucky breaks and got there only a few hours later than expected. When Jane, my PI, picked us up, it was raining very heavily, the kind of rain that simply doesn’t occur in Utah. Getting out to the car was enough to get my feet soaked wet. On the way to the airport we drove out of the storm and I thought we were going to be in the air soon enough. When we got situated at our gate another portion of the storm rolled in and set up camp over the airport. Pretty soon they had to delay all in-coming and out-going flights due to lightning. The airport was shutdown for about three hours. It quickly became apparent that we would miss our connection. The agents were very busy trying to help passengers sort out their missed connections so we had to wait quite a while to talk to sort out our connection. The agent

confirmed us on a flight from Atlanta to New Orleans in the morning and put us on stand-by for a flight later that night. She told us that Atlanta was already backed up from the same storm system and we’d likely have to spend the night at the Atlanta airport. Long story short, a very nice agent in Atlanta put us on priority stand-by and we made it onto the later flight. We were in New Orleans only a few hours later than scheduled.

I have to be honest; in my humble opinion New Orleans is not as cool as Chicago but pretty neat nonetheless. My biggest complaint was that the city seemed dirty to me. Christopher had a fair point when he mentioned that it was an old city and old cities generally looked dirtier. They had garbage bins on every curb, which I thought was odd. As I looked around though I realized how cramped the city was, especially in the French quarter, where else could they put the trash? The food was great. We went to Red Fish Grill on Bourbon Street, it was by far the best food we had there. We also went to Johnny’s Po Boys where I got the New Orleans original, the Muffaletta (See picture). Of course, we had gumbo and jambalaya.

Red Fish Grill

Johnny's Muffaletta

On the last night we were there we went to a Thai restaurant which was on the opposite side of the French Quarter from our Hotel. We walked down Royal Street all the way to the restaurant. My pineapple-fried rice was yummy. When we were done we decided to walk the entirety of Bourbon Street. By this time the sun was setting and things were getting started on Bourbon Street. Suffice it to say that two devout Christian men were educated. The live music in every bar was neat, live music is always pretty cool. Other then that I have nothing good to say about that street. I can say that women are prettier with cloths on and the adult superstore does NOT sell adults. I don’t plan on making that stroll ever again.

We spent most days in the conference listening to talks and interacting with other scientists and even a few legends in the field. Wednesday we decided to go to the local aquarium, right next to the Mississippi River. After going to look at the river and take a few pictures we went into the aquarium. It was a very neat attraction! I could go on about the variety of colorful fish, the sea otters or even the penguin exhibit. I’ll spare you and tell you my favorite creature there, the jellyfish! They were small but I think I like them best that way. They move so gracefully and are simply beautiful.

On Thursday I had to give a fifteen-minute talk. I talked mainly about recommendations made by a task force that Jane was on. It was on validation of crystallographic structures deposited in the PDB. I also talked about a new tool that I created called MolProbity Compare, which allows the user to compare two validation reports of two different models. Unfortunately my talk was in the afternoon on the last day, a lot of the participants are gone by that time. Further, there were other sessions that were happening simultaneously that I had to compete with. I frankly was surprised at the 10-15 people in the room who listened to my talk.

There you have it, New Orleans in a nutshell.

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.

SBB Seminar

This past week has been rather busy for me but also very exciting. Busy because I had to give the seminar talk in front of my whole program on Monday. That includes graduate students as well as faculty. Further, the seminar talks are usually 50+ minutes long; I had never given a presentation that long before. The problem was that although I have done a lot while I've been here, the stuff I have done isn't very presentable. I needed a concrete example of the use of a method for which I had made tools for. Its like I had made a sledge hammer, something brand new and never before seen, but I had yet to show it could tear down walls. Thus, the last week or so was not filled with antagonizing over what to say or how to present my work, rather it was doing the work so that I had something to show for it. Now I will explain what I actually did, so feel free to skip the next paragraph.

I work on methodologies to improve model accuracy given low-resolution crystallographic data. I am specifically focusing on proteins. Getting an accurate model with little error at low resolution is very difficult. In fact, there has yet to exist a mode with little error given low-resolution data. In order to get an accurate model one needs to have a good backbone. This is like saying, in order to have a sound building you must have a solid foundation. Current low-resolution structures don't even have good backbone. There are methods by which you can use hydrogen bond restraints that will keep certain regions of the backbone look like they are suppose to look. These are like extra support for the backbone. However, defining these restraints is fairly tedious. In fact, this process is simply not tractable for large molecules. My tool allows one to easily defining hydrogen bond restraints. After you do this you have to put your model through a process called refinement, luckily the computer does this step. The is where you can get backbone errors but hopefully the restraints keep the errors from occurring. So what I did was take a low-resolution model and refined it without and with several different restraints. The results were good, kind of. The backbone in regions where hydrogen bond restraints were defined looked great. However, other areas gained more errors. That means more research for me, YIPEEE!

Suffice it to say that the presentation went better than expected. I had practiced the talk the day before and got worried because I quickly got tired and my dysdtonic movements got worse making it even more difficult to talk. All though this worried me I was relatively calm going into the seminar. I decided to do something unorthodox that I had done before which is to sit rather than stand to give my presentation. It worked like a charm. I also believe that I did better live because I was getting feedback from the audience. I made them laugh, I could tell that at least some in the audience were engaged, and asking rhetorical question at the right time to further engage them. It was great. I got two similar comments, that I've actually received before, saying that my use of humor was great and actually added to the presentation. I am glad it is done now though!!

Now onto the exciting news. Las fall I had applied for two fellowships. One through the NSF and the other through the NIH. These fellowships pay for my stipend and one helps with tuition. This simply takes the burden off my PIs. I heard back from the NSF and I got the fellowship! After I had received the award letter I decided to check the status of my NIH fellowship... The status bar said that my application had been reviewed but I would nor receive word on wether or not I got funded til council meets in May. However, I was able to see the reviewers comments and the score that the gave me. The score I go was 10. OK...what does that mean? When I started reading the reviewers comments I knew 10 had to be good as there were very little criticisms. But I didn't learn what 10 meant, I went to the web for that. It turns out that what the reviewers do is score the application on different criteria on a 1-9 scale, 1 being the best. then all the reviewers come together, average their individual scores and time by ten to give you your overall score. That mens that the overall score ranges from 10-90. I was flabbergasted! Now I have to see if they'll fund me. I think they will. Now I have to see if I can take both or choose one. This is a dilemma that I don't mind having.