Camera: Leica M-P 240
Exposure: 1/250
Aperture: f/10
Focal Length: 35mm
ISO: 2,500
As we head down to the end of the year, I am reflecting on how little time I’ve had for *anything* it feels, beyond work. Photography has mos def taken a back seat to everything else that is going on professionally this year. I had such hopes for more creativity with photography at the beginning of the year.
Managing a lab, writing grants, writing and editing manuscripts, writing scripts for an upcoming thing that I’ll talk about later, planning future grants with colleagues, managing half a dozen grants and contracts to keep the lab running and all the bureaucracy associated with fighting my institution over simple contracts to get software written, HR issues that have prevented me from hiring people that could have helped with our software innovation, and IT related nonsense has just taken it out of me the last couple of years.
We’ve been pioneers in the connectomics space and built the first and highest resolution retinal connectomes and pathoconnectomes in any system on Earth. This has been incredibly innovative work and we’ve got an amazing team of people that is the best in the world at what we do. But reflecting on it, if we were freshly starting our connectomics initiatives now at the end of 2023, it would not be possible to do what we’ve done to build the infrastructure and databases given the changes at my university over the past 3 years.
Something needs to change.