Academic summer break

It's June, and I really only notice because campus is quieter when I walk in. Most of the time, however, things like the "academic year" don't affect me as a postdoc. Contrary to popular belief, academics, like K-12 educators, tend to be quite busy over the summer. Things on the blog might be quiet for a couple of weeks while I:

• Attend the Miller Symposium (already finished my talk on animal genitalia, but I need to make my poster on sex chromosomes, and write up my introduction for Dr. Pamela Ronald)
• Write and submit an abstract for ASHG2013 on gene expression in Rheumatoid Arthritis
• Submit revisions on our human Y diversity paper
• Make my poster about human Y diversity for SMBE2013 (where I'll be live-tweeting in July)
• Finish up the first draft on a paper regarding estimating TMRCA on the Y chromosome
• Submit revisions on the first paper (yay!) with a student to the Berkeley Scientific Journal (investigating the evolution of phosphatase genes)
• Hopefully ubmit my second paper with a student (yay!!) studying the timing of evolutionary strata formation
• Look forward to receiving reviews on a paper submitted with collaborators about a method to detect evolutionary strata using only sequence information from the X chromosome (no Y sequence needed!)
• Finalize a general scientific talk about sex chromosome evolution that I'll be giving on June 12 to give at the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland (5:30-8:30 - you should come!)

Other general goals for this summer:

• Write/submit a paper on Rheumatoid Arthritis gene expression
• Start a new project studying sex chromosome evolution and selection
• Mentor/Co-mentor summer undergraduate research students on a variety of projects
• Revise and resubmit K99/R00 application
• Write an article for Macmillan about "Trends in Evolution"
• Blog about more awesome science
• Prepare materials for job applications (feel free to share tips, and/or academic postings!)