I had dinner last night with Mark Ellisman at my favorite local sushi hangout, Kyoto. Akira and Rocky took care of us by supplying us with hamachi kama with a ponzu dipping sauce, toro, aji and more. The dinner was wonderful as usual and the company was equally as pleasant. Mark was in town to give a talk to the neuroscience students at the University of Utah and delivered an informative presentation titled “Multiscale Imaging of the Nervous System with Advanced Cyberinfrastructure”. In addition to this talk, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing two of his previous talks, once for the Brain Institute and the other for SCI. Each time I have learned something new about computational ultrastructural research, molecular probe development and the insights that this work gives to cell biology as well as wider neuroscientific questions. For those of you who don’t know, Mark directs the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) and has also founded the Biomedical Informatics Research Network, both efforts critical to the future development and collaboration of neuroscientific research. In addition to the obvious scientific discourse over dinner, conversation ranged from politics to hot-rodding to education to exciting new projects and ideas for further development of existing ones. Throughout it all he was gracious, engaging and knowledgeable. Thanks for the conversation Mark, and I look forward to future interactions.
Entries have been light this month due to an absolutely insane schedule. Earlier this week, I finished the third paper of the year including two reviews on top of collaborative work with the Levine lab, Palanker research group, Baehr lab, Rohr lab, Fliesler lab and some in lab teaching while trying to make myself generally useful and justify my existence in the Marc laboratory. Because of this and the need for other papers yet to be written this year, we decided to skip an ARVO presentation, yet I’ve found myself a co-author on two presentations for the Levine lab. All this means that pictures have been light as I have not been able to do much photography so far this year or write much in the way of Apple Computer centric commentary. However, I am looking forward to having some time in the next little while for opportunities to fulfill both desires. It’s not my favorite place in the world, but a trip to Florida is coming up as well as some notable announcements from Apple by the end of the month. More on all of that later.