New Home & Job in DC

So it’s been a while since a blog update. I appreciate and understand this, and apologize for the delay. It has been a very long and complicated Spring: managing logistics, applying, planning, moving, and being pulled in every direction. Things are very well though, and settling down every so slightly. Here’s the overview. =]

In May, I finished my first year in the JHU-NIH Graduate Partnership Program. I completed the four core courses in cellular, molecular, developmental biology and biophysics, took a viruses & antivirals course, an adv. topics in biochemistry course, TA’d undergraduate biochemistry and cell biology, and won a teaching award for the former. Hopkins is an amazing institution. I know well and good that the undergrads there receive an absolutely world-class education, and I feel mine has been incredibly enriched by the experience. Research this past year at Hopkins has been in areas much less familiar to me — dev bio and biophysics. I worked with zebrafish, and later coded in Fortran and Unix (Awk, Grep). For your infinite enjoyment, copies of the rotation presentations can be found here, and here.

At the end of May, our lease expired and I moved from Baltimore to Rockville, MD. I moved in with one of the two friends/classmates I had been living with the past year temporarily (more on this in a moment), while awaiting my new home. “Temporarily” became quite the incorrect word, as my condo purchase became an extremely drawn-out endeavor. My original closing date denoted in the purchase contract was May 11, 2009 and following construction delays, permit delays, and other delays we finally settled last Wednesday July 29, 2009. As of last Saturday I was no longer homeless, no longer sleeping on a futon (ouch…neck), and living in Washington DC!

This summer I have been working in the Lab of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. I am studying the opportunistic and ubiquitous protozoan pathogen, Toxoplasma gondii. In addition, we applied for an HIV/AIDS research fellowship to bring in funding and keep me in the lab on a permanent basis. This fellowship was awarded last Tuesday, and I will join Dr. Alan Sher’s lab for my graduate work. Exciting times.

In other news, my girlfriend gets her wisdom teeth out this Friday, and I am looking forward to a relaxing weekend unpacking and making her smoothies. All for now.