Blogger Update: My New Adventure in Michigan

You may have noticed that I have not been around my blog lately. What's been going on? Well like most bloggers from time to time, I got hit over the head with a lot of other projects, and the blog had to take a back seat. Fortunately these projects have been starting to wrap up nicely and I am excited to get back to Prophage.

So what have I been up to? Well the biggest update is that I will be defending my thesis in the very near future (October 2), which is essentially the graduation event for PhD candidates in biomedical research. Shortly after I defend, I will be moving to Ann Arbor to conduct research as a post doctoral fellow in the Pat Schloss lab at the University of Michigan. While it will be tough to leave Penn and my current lab, I am excited for the amazing people and research at Michigan. I will be continuing to focus on microbiome research in my new position.

In preparation for all of this, I have been away from my blog and focusing on writing my thesis, finishing up projects, and preparing for our move. This is all going very well, and will result in some really cool papers and releases that I am excited to talk about here on Prophage once they are public. As things start to wrap up, I am going to continue to blog as close to my usual weekly schedule as I can, however it may be a little spotty until I am at Michigan in the end of October. Keep checking back, or sign up for updates so that you can be alerted when a new post is up.

Now that we are all caught up, I'll leave you with a sneak peak of next week's post. I will be talking about my experience writing an R package (a sort of software toolkit for the R statistical program), and getting that package uploaded to CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network). I'll also talk about the package's functionality, and how it provides easy visualization of longitudinal microbiome data using standard data output from Qiime and Mothur. For now, you can check it out on CRAN and GitHub!