Happy New Year

Here’s to wishing all of my Readers a fantastic 2015.

May your grants be funded, your papers accepted and your promotions obtained.

I am looking forward to a year in which my work needle is shifted from the grant writing side to the paper publishing side…I do appreciate those moments.

We had a bit of new assay development last year that should, in theory, move into the productivity stage. I don’t know what all we will get done but it will be interesting. To me, if nobody else (and that’s what matters, right?).

There are two non-data things I need to finally write this year. One is a review, the other is a something-else I’ve been trying to write for several years now.

I need to recruit at least one postdoc….

It is NOT, despite temptation, a year to get involved in University political machinations. I know better and must resist.

I contemplate, as always, the deficiencies of the NIH grant scheme and think about the places I need to poke. If Sally Rockey is really leaving then this is a place to turn up the blog noise when her successor arrives. My IRL moves are, naturally, directed much closer to the ground game.

Exercise more, drink less (coffee and alcohol). I am in generous company there, I suspect.

Plot the next assault on a Big Mech. I am of mixed opinion as you know, Dear Reader. Naturally I am wary of boondoggles. They can be highly inefficient and are a huge pain in the butt for the main people driving the program. However, this is one area that arises from a crystal clear strategic need and a misfit with traditional R01s.

Actually there are two of them I need to pursue. One really needs to be done so that the little subfield stops screwing around continuing to fail upwards in tiny increments. The biggest hurdle here is actually of the personnel / political variety…and I suck at navigating those. I am not sympathetic to egos when NIH grants are on the line and I have no idea how to communicate with the egotistical type. The second project is much easier from the personnel standpoint because it can move forward with the good-personality people as the major players and YHN as the major figure. For this one the hurdle is clearly the science, meaning Program and peer-review enthusiasm.

I take two really vacationy vacations each year. The kind where I don’t even try to work and where we have a ton of help wrangling the offspring. You know the type. I have to figure out how to expand those by about 50%.