It has been a busy summer. Doesn't feel like I had much time away from the office. I'm currently inundated with teaching duties - it isn't going badly, but it is taking all the energy I have to keep it from going badly. The goal of this course is a survey of why we study organismal biology, for students who are not majoring in biology. So we just spent the past few weeks learning about how organisms are intimately and physiologically tied to their environment (and introduced the problem of climate change as an opportunity to test this idea with surveys to compare with historical distributions and forecasts for the coming decades). Next up is the whole of biodiversity itself.

I was also able to finally publish Katelyn's paper in PeerJ. It came out really nicely thanks to the help of one kind peer reviewer in particular; I think I was emphasizing some of the wrong points in the first version of the manuscript and now it really makes it clear that the EF1A mutants (those carrying one copy of the mutant allele) are physiologically distinct beasts. Should be a lot of interesting work to be done following that up!

Otherwise, like you all, I'm overwhelmed. Too much to do, anxiety about doing it well, anxiety for how so many are being affected by terrible weather and yes, terrible politics. What a year.

Tags: teaching