If you are living in this current time and not viewing this as some research project 100 years in the future, you probably expect getting back to work in the lab will be tricky. For me, this summer, it’s a little bit of yes and no.
I am closing in on the end of the pre-tenure phase of my career at Davidson. My tenure dossier will be due in the Fall of 2021, and I’ll want to wrap up as much work as possible in time for the evaluation. My plan for the next 15 months has been to reduce the number of student researchers to give myself time to focus on finishing what many previous students have started. During Fall 2019, I committed to two students with one winning a prestigious Davidson summer research grant. However, when everything ground to a halt in March, all our plans were thrown into the trash bin!
These two students were still very much interested in trying to make it work, and seeing that, I couldn’t deny them. But Davidson isn’t allowing on-campus research, so it’s going to be remote. We’ve agreed to try out X-ray crystallography and computational research as much as possible to give them skills while still keeping them connected to the projects we have in the group. That’s the tricky part.
The not-tricky part, I hope, is that I’m going to be working in my lab alone this summer. As I had planned, I want to finish up work that was started before, but now I’ll be focused on things that can be incorporated into the work that the remote students are doing. Here’s a picture of me on my first day back in lab (today!).
So wish us luck on this crazy summer. We’ll see where it takes us!
