Media exposure?

http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2012/jul/30/cancer-diagnosis-doesnt-derail-mu-bike-enthusiast/

I spent last week working at my PhD mentor's lab at University of Notre Dame. She moved there last summer and because my wife is an MD student and I'm an MD/PhD student, there was too much craziness in moving. So we decided to stay here in Columbia. After 5 years of living here, it finally feels like we're planting some roots down. We actually bought a house this month and took our first trip to Home Depot today. One of they guys working there seemed to get a little made at me for being a cyclist because the olympic coverage of the road race was 4 or 5 hours long. It was pretty hilarious I guess.

Anyway, I had planned on being at Notre Dame for 2 weeks but the equipment I was using broke, so I came home early. As I was driving back on saturday afternoon, I remembered that the Show Me state mountain bike race was 10 minutes from my house on sunday. I've never raced after not riding at all for a week. I guess it's hard to generalize as say that I'll never do it again, but the pain and shock to my body was such that I think I'll do my best to avoid repeating that again.

Pretty cool to be in the paper yesterday. The reporter got a few things off, but generally did a great job. I don't think he wrote a single thing down when he interviewed me so that was all from memory.

Been awhile

Summer is rolling along here in the midwest...

There hasn't been much too blog about lately. I've been working on my PhD project a bunch and will be traveling to do some experiments in my mentor's lab at Notre Dame next week. Pretty cool stuff...I'll be using a very fancy laser and microscope to cut out individual cancer cells from 60-70 different patient's throat cancers. I'll then isolate the RNA from those cancers and perform next generation deep sequencing on each sample with the goal of identifying molecules called microRNAs that correlate with the presence of cancer and the severity of cancer. From there, we'll integrate that information into a nanomembrane-based nucleic acid sensor to provide a multiplexed platform to be able to detect cancers and viral infections associated with cancers. The long term goal is to optimize a technology to enable analysis of cells obtained from an oral rinse and gargle protocole and develop point-of-care diagnostics that can be used in a common dental clinic to detect oncogenic HPV.

I'm also super stoked that I'll have more teaching responsibilities this coming fall. I'll get to help 2nd year medical students learn about basic pathology, cancer biology, and immunology.

Then my wife (who just accepted a residency position in Anesthesiology here at MU...which means we'll be Tigers longterm) is working on a cool research project as a medical student where she's trying to get some statistical power to make some conclusions about common injuries in cyclocross compared to other forms of cycling. Anyway, stay tuned if you wouldn't mind filling out a survey sometime. I'm hoping she can get a little travel funding so we can go to Madison for nationals!

Riding-wise, I did a local road race today. It was a bunch of fun. My goal was just to keep the pace high and do as much work as possible then co-operate/align myself with anyone interested in a joint-effort (can you tell I'm a shitty road racer?). I got in a break at the end but couldn't bridge up to Tracy Smith or this other guy from KC, so I tried to lead out Benji and Tony Mayfield from Big Tree cycling (I didn't have teammates in the race). Almost a 300w and 24-25mph average for a little over an hour, so definitely a solid effort. I felt really good but don't have much high-end fitness at all right now.

Next up is 1-2 weeks off  from riding and transitioning to some CX training. Can't wait!