Introducing.....me

   

  Welcome to my little corner of the internet!  I'm embarking on this blog journey as a way to exercise my science writing muscles.  I'm still not certain how aggressive I want to be with promoting this blog.  For right now, my intention is to just get words on paper, er um, font on screen...  This is fairly unknown territory to me, so excuse me while I navigate my way through the fog of finding a my niche.

     So on to introductions....Who am I?  Thank you for asking!  I'm a scientist currently studying HIV.  I've got experience in molecular biology, immunology, and microbiology, but I don't want to limit my interest to those fields.  I'm looking forward to reading more on other areas (primarily in biomedical sciences) and learning new and exciting things in all aspects of scientific discovery.

So why this?  Why now?  Who even reads blogs anymore?

I have several good intentions for starting this space, and here are a just a few:

1.  Read more, more often

            There are times as a scientist when your desk is piled high papers.  Usually this is before writing your research up, making sure you have the bigger picture covered in your background; or when you’re a graduate student, preparing for qualifying exams.  Other times, you carry the same handful of papers in your bag, with every good intention to read them.  They become a permanent, crumpled fixture in your back pack, until you don’t even notice them or the extra weight anymore.

            The hope is to get back to reading and thinking about science on a regular schedule.  Looking through the current literature around my own specialty (HIV latency), but also expanding my horizons to see what else is shaking in the world of biomedical research.

2.  Write more, more often

            I love writing, and would love to use my writing skills more with my science skills.  Why don’t you move over to a career in science communications, you may say....well although my resume is beefy in the science area, I don’t have much of a track record for science writing.  I’ve got three review articles (look ‘em up, at least two are in open access journals), but having something to show by way of writing science for a different audience might be a nice thing.  

In the meantime, this forum will give me the opportunity to attempt to figure out how to get to the Carnegie Hall of science communications.  

(here's a hint....practice, practice, practice.)

3.  Makes the things that I love (biomedical research) interesting to the people that I love (non-science friends.....yes fellow scientists; I do have a few of those!)

            As a scientist, we often find ourselves in the company of our peers, discussing science in all its jargon-y glory.  When we are with family and friends, it is sometimes a struggle to make our research interesting to them.  I like to think that I’m not too bad at this, but I also might have friends and family who are either too kind to tell me that I am  speaking gibberish or they just pretend to understand so that we aren’t talking about HIV transcription for the rest of the evening.  I guess this will be a bit of trial by fire to see if I can actually distill the essence of biomedical research into a palatable cocktail for everyone to enjoy.

       So that’s it, by way of an introduction, let’s see how this goes....