It has been a month since I last wrote and a busy one at that. It is now the end of the semester and the taught part of my MSc here in Edinburgh. I have some great news, I have been offered a PhD at Brown University in Rhode Island (1 hour from Boston, 3.5 from New York) starting at the end of August and finishing 5 years later in 2010. I have not yet had it in writing, but when I do I think I will accept the offer. I have applied for a number of PhD's in the UK as well, but none of them are offering such a long, extensive program that will get me up to scratch in biology, mathematics and statistics. The program is Computational Molecular Biology and it will be in the lab of Marc Tatar, who has published a lot of research in the role that insulin and other hormones play in the process of ageing.

Next week is World Model United Nations here in Edinburgh, I am an assistant director to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which should be fun. The following 3 weeks will be exam preparation for 7 MSc exams followed by a 3 day trip to the Scottish Highlands for the whole class of MSc's which I am organising, so far 30 people have signed up, so it should be fun. My last exam is on the 14th May, after which the MSc summer project will start. My project involved looking at the effect of diet restriction, insulin production and longevity in fruit flies and trying to visualise and quantify the amount produced in their brains at different points in time. It will lead into my PhD I hope.

In July I am planning on organising a Postgraduate Conference in Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology here in Edinburgh. This will be a lot of work, especially with my project on at the same time, but I think it will be a great opportunity, and something nice to organise with scientists in Europe before I cross to the other side of the pond. I will hand in my project around the 15th of August, and I start at Brown on the 29th August. I hope to see you before I go, dependng who you are and where you are :) John