We have been watching the #Staph2023 conference online this week. With several junior grad students in the lab it has been a great way to discuss things with them in real time with presentations. You don't get that experience at an in-person conference. Great experience.

After years of hearing about it, I finally made it to Swordfish Tom’s with ⁦Bret Freudenthal⁩. Great place and amazing cocktails. Can’t wait to go back and add another comment in the Freudenthal Lab little black book.

Had a great visit today at Eastern Virginia Medical School to give a seminar. Got to meet some awesome faculty and hear about the great things happening there. Thanks to Julia Sharp for the invitation.

New paper from my colleague ⁦@wolfzueckert⁩ on lipoprotein transport in B. burgdorferi. I was on Huan’s committee and it is great to see this come out as she moves on to her postdoc. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

Had a great time last week at the 67th Annual Wind River Conference on Prokaryotic Biology Wind River Prokaryotic Conference! Thankful to have met so many amazing researchers in the field from across the country!

I feel like submitting a grant is like sending my kids to middle school this year. You hope they will make friends but they are probably just gonna get picked on

Whoa, maybe it is time to ask MyPillow for a grant. foxnews.com/health/bedbugs…

⁦Walgreens⁩ Calling BS on this commercial. I had an appt yesterday for COVID booster. Drove 30 min to get it and was told when I got there that they had it in stock but would not give it to me cuz they were “short staffed” despite me seeing 5 people working. Never again

Our lab elf, Petri, is back to hang out for the season. More pictures over the next weeks.

Petri tried to blend in, but not so great.

Nothing says Happy Holidays more than the 500 paper review requests received this week.

The federal government says where i grew up was not rural enough. Today my mom realized why their internet is not working. The corn next door was too tall. My brother had to chop the tops off a bunch to get internet back. That should be the definition of rural

I just got back from a double work trip. It started with a great visit to UTK Microbiology. It was exciting to hear about all the great things happening there. Faculty and students were both fantastic to talk to. Thanks Andrew Monteith for the invite.

Check out our new paper (my first protein/structure paper) on FakA entitled: Molecular insights into the structure and function of the Staphylococcus aureus fatty acid kinase in Journal of Biological Chemistry jbc.org/article/S0021-…

Happy to have our recent YjbH paper online at Virulence. Full article: YjbH contributes to Staphylococcus aureus skin pathology and immune response through Agr-mediated α-toxin regulation tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Feel free to use this: Dear Senator (Insert name), As a public servant to the American People, what did you do last week? Please reply with 5 examples of what you did.

If Springer Nature is making $100 millions per year in profit, why do we pay publishing charges?

Our department is hiring a faculty that is an Immunologist with a cancer focus. Please share.

Nothing makes me happier than seeing tariff charges on my scientific orders. 😡 What a waste of federal grant dollars.