Sabbatical Part 6

Early Spring Edition: From Sun to Snow

We are now well into the New Year, and I’ve spent a fair amount of it on the road.  Here’s an update:

1. I got out of the Pacific Northwest gray winter and headed south to California, where I spent nearly a month working remotely.  Work was interspersed with rainbow-filled short hikes around the central coast.
   
   

   Morro Bay

   

   Harmony Headlands

   

   Montana de Oro Beach

   

   Los Osos

   I was also at the Polar Bear Plunge in Cayucos, CA (as an observer, obviously).
   

2. During my time in California, I had a quick trip to visit biology and CS faculty at Harvey Mudd College.  I then drove up north to Portland, stopping in San Fransisco & the Shasta Lake caverns for some sightseeing.
   
   

   Pier 39

   

   Pier 39

   

   Shasta Lake Caverns

   

   Shasta Lake Caverns
3. I returned to a bunch of research projects in full swing.   My postdoc’s BIBM 2018 paper on localized PathLinker was invited to be in a special issue of BMC Systems Biology.  The differential privacy crew (led by computer scientist Adam Groce and statistician Andrew Bray) had a paper on differentially private ANOVA officially accepted to PETS.  We also submitted a paper (with a former student as first author) on signaling pathway connectivity using directed hypergraphs.  I also started some brand-new collaborations with Layla Oesper at Carleton College, and wrapped up a project with Ali Bashir at the Icahn School of Medicine and Mt. Sinai.
   

   Minneapolis, MN

4. I then flew to Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, where I gave a talk on signaling pathway analysis and caught up with colleagues and good friends Catie Welsh in Computer Science and Dan Blustein in Neuroscience.
5. Finally, I trekked to snowy Minneapolis, MN, for the 50th SIGCSE conference, where I saw colleagues from undergrad, grad school, and the Pacific Northwest.  What a great meeting – it was worth the cold.

Here’s hoping for warm weather soon.