I have been remiss, once again taking a protracted break from this blog. I was essentially forced, by economic factors beyond my control, into taking quarter of this year off work. I used this time to re-assess, travel, reflect and generally think about myself and my own directions; time I’ve not taken since 1999, which was careless of me. Whether I can consider myself rested enough within three months is neither here nor there, for I am back, or at least I will be back, but in a somewhat modified form.
One of the big problems with maintaining a science blog where I wander through a range of subject matter is that it does rather take my eyes away from my day job, and you only need read a few science blogs to realise the the day job of a jobbing postdoc is rather full of teaching, supervision, research, reading, writing and banging ones head against a wall. Thus, whilst I was increasingly thankful for this distraction in my last research position, I have recently joined a new research team who are doing some interesting and meaningful work; I will be taking the advice of Daniel McArthur of Genetic Future who at Science Online London 2009 said that one way to succeed at both blogging and your day job is to fuse the two. To that end, this is what I will be doing, obviously not giving the game of our own research away, that would be silly, but instead talking about the field in general.
So what field? Well, my new position sees me returning to my roots; I started out in Staphylococcal molecular genetics a decade ago and spent my most formative doctoral training years working in a rather academic aspect of horizontal gene transfer. It was then, and still is (though not for long) a highly under-studied area of research that couldn’t possibly be more important with what we are coming to understand about the nature of antibiotic resistance, evolutionary microbiology and the human microbiome. I am now working in an area that brings together several recurring themes of interest for me: evolution, horizontal gene transfer, bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus to be precise) and antibiotics research, specifically the evolution of bacterial fitness.
This is exciting times for me, and I can’t tell you how many fantastic papers I’ve already discovered from my period of absence in this field; people have been busy, and I intend to talk about it. However, much of what I have to say won’t necessary be in this blog, for I will be moving. This blog will remain of course, as part of my efforts to regale you with edifying titbits.
As for where I will be moving to, well I now have a blog over at the Nature Network, called ‘The Gene Gym‘.
I will not be closing this blog down, it will be a repository for all those science stories and titbits that don’t fit in with my Gene Gym remit.
Thanks for reading.
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