Institute Strategic Programme Group Talk

Have almost got out of the habit of blogging after pre-election purdah...

I gave a talk yesterday on the countdown 439 project and my experiences at the ISPG meeting.
I volunteered after someone else dropped out. I was worried about it as it was very different to the usual talks which are usually very science programme specific (e.g. the other speaker was talking about sRNA and flagella assembly in Campylobacter) but it seemed to go down well.

Hopefully, I may have encouraged others to do some outreach activities as it is in the BBSRC strategy.

Another visitor & more OU

We have another visiting scientist - Zhao Xiaoyan (Cindy) is from China and working with Pradeep for a month.
I had to get her laptop MAC address so she could get access to our wireless network. I'm getting good at deciphering non-english IPCONFIG reports (Dutch, Catalan and now Chinese :-)).

Delivered the latest OU Maths TMA to my tutor (for MS221) yesterday - probably not as good as I could do but at least it is done and delivered. Need to crack on wth last unit (D) of MST121 and start next unit(B) of MS221 - no rest for the wicked!

Conference

Went to Bioinformatics conference in Cambridge last week. Presented Biotracer poster.
Some quite good talks plus I went to a couple of workshops organised by BBSRC projects (Ondex, Genesys and Stomp). Packed quite a lot into three days. Took OU stuff along as MS221 TMA submission date looming :-(
NB Finally added links to project pages...

National Science and engineering week

Second visit to local school. Spoke to 4 classes (~100 pupils) and discussed Science.
Very impressed by their knowledge and their grasp of the problem that we discussed (Food Security). Seems like my colleagues had a good time as well.
Feeling pretty exhausted though as it was very intense.

School Science talk - Countdown 439

As part of countdown 439 (also part of National Science and Engineering week) I gave a talk on Science, being a scientist and how science relates to Food Security.
I had an hour slot and broke talk into 3 pieces with activities where the class of about 25 pupils participated.
I tried to tackle stereotypes about scientists and explain how I got into science as well.
Seemed to go OK - have got four more classes to talk to tomorrow

Keeping busy...

I'm finishing off a scientific conference poster for some work on the EU biotracer project and preparing some material for schools visits as part of Countdown 439 - two very different audiences. Plus I'm working hard on my OU Maths course...

PhD Student visiting

Xavier, a PhD student is visiting our group for a few months. My boss has a project lined up for him on variability. This will be modelled in NetLogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/) so I'm helping him get up to speed with it (as we've used it for a few projects). It is a very good package for Agent Based Modelling. It is written in Java but the models are written in a flavour of Logo. Finished models can easily be deployed as Java Applets. It delivers a reasonable GUI without the modeller having to do much programming, leaving them free to concentrate on the underlying science and the modelling process.