Another day, many meetings. The academic world is one of much urgency - and some days, I’m concerned that all this urgency is more about assembling the machine that lets us do our work, rather than just doing our work.

Also, I’ve self-imposed some new duties upon my schedule: I have a new computer (a beautiful Mac Pro with gobs of memory to replace my Mac Mini that was just underpowered for my needs). That means moving things around, and attempting to reorganize these things. I have 10 years worth of data, photos, manuscripts, ideas, letters, you name it.... and it is becoming a more frequent quest of luck to find things when colleagues request them. The hope is that even if nobody sees my hard drive, I am improving the feng shui of how it is arranged, how the information is arranged, and perhaps I’ll put a mirror and an auspicious color in there as well to somehow maintain my good fortune so far.

Better news, better mood: Mary Rougeau Browning passed her MS defense with flying colors on Tuesday, the lab’s first master’s student and she did fantastic work. Mary was exploring how to use math and models from community ecology and biogeography to explore the cellular organization of mammalian thymus, an important model for understanding immune development in vertebrates. This is an extreme outreach branch from the coral disease work that has been going on at UGA with my colleagues and I, and very exciting collaboration between Mary, myself, Andrew Park, and Nancy Manley. Great job Mary!