My cats have probably forgotten me

After a week in Canberra, I was home for a day or so, and then had to fly off to England. I've just arrived in Leeds after 36 hours of travel time, where I am about to collapse into a coma. I'm here to visit with my collaborators and to give a talk at a membrane transporter workshop. My talk has one of my sillier titles to date- "Channeling David Attenborough- Studying Bacterial Drug Efflux Pumps in their Native Habitat".

The Met Hotel, my room is somewhere on the 3rd floor

Catching up on posts from last week

My birthday at the NHMRC panel. The chairperson's wife baked me a birthday cake! It came complete with birthday candles thanks to the NHMRC!

Photo thanks to Mark Schembri

If it's August this must be Canberra

It's that time of the year again, where I get to spend a week in Canberra on an NHMRC Grant Review Panel. Here's last year's post. Actually, even though my blog posts complain about it, I actually enjoy serving on the panel, it's interesting to see what other researchers are up to. Although, it's a little unfortunate that every year it seems to coincide with my birthday.

In other news, apparently we have a federal election happening, and there's even some chance Australia might win a cricket test. My schedule in Canberra is too busy to have time to pop over to see Kevin Rudd. Actually, he's probably off campaigning in a marginal electorate somewhere.

The Shine Dome- Home to the Australian Academy of Sciences, and where we have our initial briefing session for our Grant Review Panel

Be Excellent to Each Other

I'm currently working on an ARC Centre of Excellence bid led by Eddie Holmes at the University of Sydney- The Centre of Excellence in Microbial Diversity, Evolution and Control. Eddie has done a heroic job herding us all together, and putting together an exciting proposal for what would be a globally unique Centre. This Centre aims to characterize the biodiversity of microbial species in Australia, how these microbes evolve, jump species boundaries and cause disease, and how best to control and eradicate them. 
Assuming no nervous breakdowns occur, the Centre proposal will be submitted next week. For those of you who haven't seen a Centre of Excellence proposal before, when printed out it makes a stack of paper about a foot or two high. I feel sorry for the panel that will have to review 22 of these applications.
I've previously been funded by the ARC as part of a SuperScience Fellowship, if our Centre of Excellence is funded that would make us both super and excellent.

And Party on Dudes

Seminar at ANU

It's clearly the month to be popping around giving seminars. Tomorrow morning I fly out to Canberra to give a seminar at ANU.

Apologies to Charles Dickens

For anyone who is interested, I'm giving a talk tomorrow at UNSW on "A tale of two bacteria and many omics". Half of the talk will be on our marine cyanobacterial research and the other half on discovery of new drug efflux pumps in the opportunistic pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii.

Martin is a shell of his former self

Martin is still recovering from his experiences on the Indigo V expedition.  As can be seen in this photo, he is really a shell of his former self.