It has been a while since I last posted something to my blog and you may have noticed that my frequency of blogging has steadily declined since last year. I guess my inspiration and interest have declined and that is why I am calling it quits for now. I may occassionally write something here and there, but very infrequently. The stuff I have going on at work is taking a lot of my time and energy and I like it. I am running several independent projects in different roles, including sequencing stuff, including supervising tasks, and it is great. It means I have less time to devote to blogging and things, if I also want to have a social life and do sports and all that. It also relates to the end of my KWF Fellowship will end Feb 2010 and my preparations to move on after that.

I am writing this from the Netherlands and being here after six months makes me realize how much I miss it. But I also know that I love a lot of things about Massachusetts and the USA. Every choice comes with great perks and some downsides. I still dont really know what I am going to and frankly am overwhelmed by the options, scientifically, geographically, professionally.

Thanks for reading my blog and stay in touch. For whatever it is worth, I am saving the site to remind myself how I experienced my first two years in Boston.

Yesterday, I was drinking rose in the Peter Stuyvesant park in Manhattan, New York, enjoying the gorgeous weather of about 82F/28C. A very nice small park named after the Dutch founder of the New York, called New Amsterdam at the time. Quite a contrast with last weekend, when I was in Denver, Colorado, trapped on a highway in a scary snow blizzard.

We came back from skiing in one of the best ski resorts in the United States - Vail. About an hour away of the jetset skiing resort of Aspen. Skiing there was something else, and I never crashed so hard as there. A reminder to start wearing a helmet next year. After skiing, we went to a big cancer conference called the AACR, which was very interesting from many perspectives. Came back on Wednesday, then left for a quick trip to New York on Saturday. It seems we pretty much went from freezing winter cold to warm summer weather in a weeks time. All trees are suddenly in blossom and my eyes have starting tearing and itching, signs of hay fever. I am glad winter is finally over.

Just came back from probably our last skiing trip this season. That is, skiing with the group of friends I hang with at a regularly basis. I have one more trip planned in two weeks from now, when I will ski with a colleague-friend in Vail in Colorado. This is prior to a conference I am attending - one of the nicer parts of being in science. On this weekend we were with nineteen people and we stayed over in a really nice house we discovered on an earlier trip.

It comes complete with a pool table and hot tub, plus plenty of space and a lake side view. To organize a trip for nineteen people can be a little tricky here and there. It seems typical Cambridge mentality to definitely say YES on all invitations you get - until something better comes along, that is. The head count for this trip varied between twenty three and seventeen people joining. Since most houses require full payments prior to your stay and transportation also needs to be arranged, this can be a little frustrating here and there. I also do not seem to learn from prior trips, where more or less the same thing happened.
Having said that, these trips with about fifteen to twenty people joining are generally phenomenal. As was this weekend. We party and dance until late at night, only to get up again early in the morning for a day at the slopes. This weekend we counted people from ten different counties, from five different continents. Represented were Europe (France, Germany, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Ukraine), South America (Argentina), Asia (Iran), North America (Mexico), and Africa (Morocco). And yes, there was no native American on the trip - something we will have to work on in the future.

The last weeks have been busy but in a good way. My new car has been tested on two trips, on to New York and one to Sunday River (the ski area for which I have a season pass). It is still awesome. In between those activities there were several things at work that required a lot of attention. Despite all the economical turmoil the funding for my main project has been increased and we now have to apply for that money.

This is an open process and since we talk about lots of money many institutes around the country will compete with us. This means we have been working frantically to get all the preliminary data, all the right figures, etcetera. On top of that, I received a phone call from my boss last week if I wanted to the Cancer Meeting talk this week. Now, this meeting is a BIG meeting where every postdoc typically presents once during his postdoc period. I accepted, and as soon as the announcement was made many colleagues approached me to tell me that they saw that I was presenting (increasing my stress about this talk about tenfold). On Tuesday morning I did it, and it went pretty good. I presented the stuff that we describe in the manuscript that we have recently submitted (which is now finally being reviewed, by the way). Impressive to be there, but at the same time quite exciting that I have finally done that talk myself.
So I am looking at another weekend of working which is fine. Sometimes the tide is low and sometimes the tide is high. It won’t stop me from going out tonight and tomorrow

After months of trying to convince myself that I really need one, it is finally there. I bought a car. The picture shows one similar to the one I got and the color matches too. A recent ski trip convinced me that I really would like to be able to do such trips without being dependent on anybody.

And interestingly, two years of residence in Boston seems to be the point where more people have gotten cars. After two years it is just time to extend the horizon beyond the point where the bus and subway take you, I guess. So the coming weekend I will be driving up for more skiing and a New York weekend is soon to follow.
I got the car from a private person. At first sight you might think it is a little big for me, after all I am just by myself. And you are right about that. However, cars are pretty cheap here (the same car goes for at least double the price in the Netherlands). Plus I have experienced several icy roads and I prefer a bigger car at those moments. So the Passat it had to be. This is the fourth car that I have bought and looking back it seems that they get bigger every time. Let’s hope I will enjoy this one as much as I have enjoyed the other ones

Two things dominate the news currently: 1) the wind of change called Obama and 2) the credit crisis. The first started off well. I cannot remember ever having seen an US inauguration live, but we watched it at the Broad with about 80% of the people working here. To my surprise, many people in Europe saw the ritual as well.

And Obama has started living up to expectations, with his promised closing of Guantanamo Bay.
With regards to the credit crunch, I cannot get away from the impression that this is largely driven by the masses chanting how bad economy currently is. If people would start to be realistic they would realize that it aint all that bad. I am also a little surprised by the seemingly endless amounts of money that governments suddenly seem to have. Somewhere, somebody is getting quite wealthy of that money.
The US seems to be more affected by changes in economy than Europe. However, for two reasons I believe that this will not be the end of the US domination. First, the enormous wealth in the US continues to surprise me, I think the country can take some financial beating. Second, the flexibility of the country and the people will outperform the rest of the world.
Personally I am not really affected by this. I have a year left on my fellowship and Obama is actually increasing the budgets for science. Actually, the decrease in house prices make me wonder if I should try to buy an apartment here…

Every once in a while, I post a blog with some reflection on how things are working out, ever since I came to the US. The first one was posted in Dec 2007, at which stage I was not very satisfied. The second one was not too long after that, and my mood had increased subtantially. So how are things now? Looking back at last year, I can only say that it was a great year. I managed to get in touch with a large group of great people, from countries such as Spain, France, Switzerland and even exotic ones such as Iran.

Most of us are in the same situation, doing scientific research and arriving in Boston by ourselves. We all work hard and compensate that by having a maximum amount of fun outside work hours - partying, skiing, swimming, traveling. It feels a little bit like a second student life and considering that many of us - even though we are all around age 30 - live with roommates, that ain’t that far of the truth.
At work, things have really started to develop over the last year as well. I got more and more involved in the TCGA project and although this is a huge project (with over twenty people working in it within my institute alone) it really feels like “my” project. And although my recently submitted paper got rejected at the first journal, I am confident that we will be able to get a good publication out of it.
And in the fast-paced world that is science, I have to consider my next steps. Boston? New York? Europe? Do another postdoc? Apply for faculty? I have my thoughts, and my plans, and we will see how things develop over the next year. To conclude: 2008 has been pretty much a kickass year and I hope that 2009 will be no less. Read the blog to stay posted.

Six degrees to Kevin Bacon is a concept that says everybody is connected to everybody through a string of five people. It started with Kevin Bacon who at some point said he had worked with more or less everybody in Hollywood, or somebody who worked with them. A similar concept exists in mathematical science, where researchers can calculate the shortest path of collaboration to Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös.

My Paul Erdös number is four, by the way. Since last week, my Obama number is two. Eric Lander, director of Broad, was named as one of Obama’s scientific advisors. I had lunch with Eric on multiple occasions and he remembered my name, so I can say he knows me. Crazy shit that I have a common contact with Obama! I know this sounds like showing off (and it is, really) but I am truly impressed by the pace of the new administration and their choice for change. Science has suffered severely from the Bush administration, both by restrictions and financially. Obama has promised to double funding for cancer research in the coming years, and with Eric as one of his top advisors that is a promise he is likely to keep!

Last week was one of the most exciting weeks since I have been here. On Tuesday I flew to Washington for another TCGA project meeting. TCGA is my main research project. It involves a lot of important academic research institutes all across the country. On Wednesday I gave a talk about the stuff me and my collaborators have done for this project. I was a bit nervous, but I have done the same talk several times now and I think it went pretty well.

Our manuscript, that describes the same stuff as I showed in my presentation, had been circulated the week before. Fortunately, we got a lot of positive comments on both talk and paper. And FINALLY on Friday, we submitted our manuscript to one of the major scientific journals! The manuscript will now be reviewed by journal editor and reviewers and hopefully eventually accepted, but it will take anywhere between three and nine months before it is published. Still, this submission is a major highlight of my postdoc.
On Fridaynight some friends and I drove to Sunday River in Maine, for the first skiing action of the season. Although I only started skiing two years ago, it was great to be on the slopes again. Good conditions and reasonable quiet trails. A lot of Santas on Sunday. And currently I am working hard to finish off the year - I fly home next Tuesday. Life is good

Holilday season is almost here. That sounds strange if you do not live in the US, but next week is going to be a quiet because of Thanksgiving. I wrote about Thanksgiving last year so I will not tell you again that Thanksgiving is about eating turkey (the bird, not the country). Nor that the Friday after is known as Black Friday because of all the sales going on everywhere. Thanksgiving is generally more important than Christmas, perhaps mostly because it applies to all beliefs.

Imagine going to work with Christmas. That would be really weird if you have celebrated it as an important holiday your whole life. But personally I have nothing with Thanksgiving, and neither have the many other nationality postdocs here. I imagine that a good number of people are spending time in their labs. Myself, I will spend Thanksgiving with a few close friends in an ocean view house in Connecticut. Sounds gorgeous, and it will be lots of fun for sure. But remember that it is getting pretty cold here at the moment. In the weekend we still enjoyed a pleasant 22 degrees Celsius, but this morning it was minus 4! Fortunately somebody introduced the magic game of Settlers of Catan into my social circle so time spend inside will not go to waste.
Thanksgiving is about eating (it is a harvest celebration, after all) and the American contingent in our small group is making extensive plans for a huge meal. Eating, drinking, playing some board games… sounds like a typical Christmas to me!