I had a wonderful trip to Lubbock, TX to visit my good friends from grad school - Bre Harris and Zach Hohman. The main purpose was to visit the TTU Department of Biological Sciences, but it is always nice to see some friendly faces in the crowd during your seminar.
It was fascinating to hear what Bre has been up to since we were together at UCR, particularly I was intriguted by her recent research on stress and fear in Xenopus laevis frogs - with definite extensions to people! I also learned a whole lot more about the ecology of fire (as well as a great perspective on life in academia) than I ever imagined, from Dylan Schwilk. My discussions with Sean Rice, were very enlightening and they really challenged my understanding of some core quantitative genetic assumptions/practices. I’ll have to keep mulling over the ideas that arose from our dicussing for a while…
However, out of the entire trip I’m probably most excited about the lunch I had with graduate students in the TTU DBS. I enjoyed their insightful questions, and it also gave me a chance to mess around before the trip with the GIMP to produce this fabulously edited photo as the title slide to my talk with the graduate students:
I spent far more time working on this than I should have, but it sure was fun learning some photo editing tricks to replace words and faces! Can you spot Bre’s face and my own goofy mug?