Well the semester is upon me again - this fall I’m teaching my Evolution Genetics lab course with Kelly Dyer, which is a great change, and the “Welcome” class that we teach (it doesn’t have a good name...it used to be “Professors on Parade” but there were too many easy references to clowns and people in tiny go-carts, it is the class where new students learn what research is going on in the building and are exposed to basic research tools, bibliographic and bioinformatics stuff). So, really a pretty easy load, I’m lucky. And several papers got accepted this month, so I’m now at the point of having more papers published in 2009 than months so far, and more papers published than I am old (I’m really stretching for tenure criteria, can you tell?). I just got the final word on my NSF Bio-Oce proposal, though, and that word is “no” so the semester is - as always - focused on revision and resubmission.

But at the same time, we have a lot of very real concerns. We’ve been told to carefully manage student illness in our classrooms, to help avoid pandemics associated with swine flu. But what I’m really worried about are zombies (unicorn zombie image below from my favorite local artist Joe Havasy) - if you read this paper you’ll see that we could be in very bad trouble indeed if zombies attack!

Tags: students