Spring 2005

It's just a little more than a week since I submitted the renewal for my NSF Arabidopsis 2010 grant via Fastlane. The grant renewal was my primary focus between end of the Fall semester in mid-December and its submission. Because much of the important work (our in planta ESE assay and the characterization of SR protein genes) is not yet published, I focused on documenting our progress. It was great to work with people in the lab to bring it together, and I'm very pleased with what we have accomplished. On the other hand, I wish that I had spent more time (and more of the 15 page limit) elaborating my future plans, particularly the global alternative splicing microarray. I fear that I let my enthusiasm for timely and similar work by Pan et al. obscure the fact that I had been thinking hard about these experiments for some time.

Prior to that, the Fall semester was especially challenging because I was teaching two full courses simultaneously (BSCI410 and MOCB630). Thus, the past week has presented a kind of freedom that I haven't felt in several months. It has been a pleasure to do whatever task was a hand at an appropriate pace, free from the influence of an impending lecture or grant deadline.

Of course, there is a lot to do. My immediate priority is with the NIH panel (coming up in less than three weeks), and with the ESE paper I hope to submit by the end of March. There is also the 2010 web site, CBCB web sites, several searches for faculty in my field and the paper with Jason Edmonds on SR protein knockouts. Other goals for the Spring semester include getting the undergraduate Bioinformatics program approved by the PCC and writing a grant proposal for the June NIH deadline. I'd also plan to make it a habit to post here more regularly. My hope is that the time spent will be justified by frequent practice at putting my words out where they are subject to public scrutiny.