I saw a terrific thesis defense yesterday by one of our neuroscience doctoral students. What a capstone to the PhD! Today I have the honor of attending the rehearsal of yet another of our impending graduates.

My ideas have been all over the place. What better idea than to blog a bleg to Advanced Studies’ readers. I’ll post a summary of suggestions that come in.

NSF Picks Lockheed for Huge Antarctic Support Contract

As we head into Winter Break here at George Mason, there is a bit of time to sit back and reflect on the past semester: we saw the selection of a new President, the opening of some spectacular new campus facilities and an incredibly productive time for our science, both in terms of new research findings and teaching. I’m grateful to the entire faculty, staff and students at the Mason’s Institute for Advanced Study for what they’ve accomplished this Fall and look forward to the Spring semester.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to report that the traffic seems to be getting a bit lighter here as folks leave town. The weather in DC has been relatively balmy lately–as a native Californian, I’d love to see that trend continue through January and February.

For the NIH I mean. The ScienceInsider blog entry is here. The key point? NIH is considering the way it does business on its main investigator-initiated RO1 grants to deal with anticipated cuts.

I’m submerged at the moment in a virtual pile of grant proposals that are stored in my iPad. They are collectively very interesting, but also have a unique ability to suck up all of one’s available time. How far away are we from Strong AI to review grants?

MBL’s wonderful journal has a new look and feel here. It’s an honor to be the tenth editor of The Biological Bulletin. This month’s virtual symposium issue on regeneration is open access. Enjoy!

That’s the office of our CFO, Jane Wendelin. It all happened about 90 minutes ago and reminded me of my native California. Turns out it was a 5.9 earthquake, about 80 miles south of us. All of our equipment and labs are fine. Same with all of our staff.

Thanks to colleagues and friends from around the world who’ve emailed and texted.

Having just been reappointed to my third term as Director, a short blog post to acknowledge and thank the faculty, students and staff of the Institute for their confidence in my leadership. And to also thank the current leadership of the University for the same.

I look forward to continuing to work with all of our stake holders going forward to 2016 realizing of course, that there are always unforeseen circumstances and changes for which I pledge to put the interests of the Institute and the University first.