The past two weeks have been interesting. Last Tuesday I sprained my ankle badly playing basketball. Today, nearly two weeks later, is the first day that I can hobble around without an aircast. For the first week after the injury, I was on crutches. Unfortunately, the injury came two days before a trip to New York (to visit IAVI) and Washington D.C. (to visit NIAID). Navigating the Northeast on cructhes isn’t very much fun.

But while I was gone, there was lots of activity in the lab. Ben Bimber’s manuscript on killer immunoglobulin receptors in macaques received a very favorable review. Chad Pendley departed the lab to start medical school at the Medical College of Wisconsin, while Alex Blasky left to start a PhD program at the University of Colorado-Denver. Very soon, their replacements Ann Detmer and Jen Tuscher will arrive. Now we await the start of the academic year that will coincide with Shelby’s due date. Managing the responsibilities of lab with the responsibilities of parenthood promises to be interesting.

File Under: Laboratory Happenings

In the last few years, I’ve discovered that fewer and fewer hours at work are mine - most of the time I’m either coming from a meeting or going to a meeting. And when I’m not in meetings, I’m being asked about my availability for yet more meetings. It sometimes feels strange anything gets accomplished at all. And while I need to attend meetings, I’m trying to be a bit more saavy in scheduling. To wit, notice the newest addition to my toolbar, ‘Dave’s Schedule.’ This handy link takes my calendars and puts them into an HTML viewable form (without disclosing what I’m actually doing). Hopefully this will simplify meeting planning, if only a little.

In other news, at night we now face the age old struggle - work on our soon-to-be-due grants or watch DVDs of ‘How I Met Your Mother’. The last two nights, Doogie has won.

File Under: Laboratory Happenings

A few people have asked about the countries where our visitors have come from. Here is a map showing where their geographic distribution:



We’ve even had a visitor from Eritrea! Soon the sun will never set on the O’Connor lab web empire.

In the last two weeks we submitted a manuscript for consideration by the Journal of Immunology. Hopefully the reviewers will like it. Even if they don’t, the lead author, Ben Bimber, probably won’t care too much since he is getting married this weekend! Congratulations Ben!

Shelby is still very pregnant, though both of us are scurrying to submit grants for the September 7 NIH deadline.

We are also starting to prepare for this fall’s offering of the UW-Madison undergrad class Pathology 210: HIV: Sex, Science, and Society that I am coordinating along with Dr. Tom Friedrich.

Lastly, we are preparing for this year’s nonhuman primate models for AIDS meeting in December. I am co-chairing the meeting with help from staff at both UW-Madison and the Carribbean Primate Research Center. Early response is incredibly positive. We are a month away from the abstract deadline and already we are running short of hotel rooms for the nights immediately before and after the meeting.

File Under: Laboratory Happenings

We now have more than a month of tracking data from Google Analytics. It is amazing to me how far-flung some of our visitors are. Our little lab web site has been visited by people from places that I couldn’t point to on a map (Carlisle, UK? Kuantan, Malaysia? Really?).

I’m writing this at the tail end of the long Independence Day weekend. Though I frittered my Sunday away watching the Wimbledon finals, the lab has been positively hopping the last few weeks. With Alex Blasky and Chad Pendley weeks from starting grad school and med school, and their replacements already busy at work, we have never seemed like such a large lab before. Hopefully we haven’t reached our carrying capacity yet!

Let’s see...other news:

• Alex Blasky had his paper on reference-strand mediated conformational analysis accepted for publication at Immunogenetics
• Ben Burwitz passed his graduate school Prelim A with aplomb
• Ben Bimber is preparing a paper for submission to the Journal of Immunology while preparing for his upcoming nuptuals
• Shelby O’Connor is now 30 weeks pregnant and looking the part
• We are busily writing grants for the upcoming NIH AIDS grant deadline and bracing ourselves for this fall’s Pathology 210 class

That’s all for now. Big thanks to those of you taking the time to read about our lab from afar.

File Under: Laboratory Happenings