And she still has time for some music!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let me be the first to say, as a proud father: she done good.  I mean real good.  She wants to pursue a degree in alternative energy and invent a way to run cars on water.

Based on her career interests, the contenders were long ago whittled down to:

1. University of Kansas
2. Meredith College/North Carolina State University.

At the University of Kansas, she was accepted directly into the school of Engineering (kind of a big deal) where she would study Chemical Engineering, as it is the closest approximation to her interest in alternative energy.  She was invited to live in the Scholarship dormitory with other high achieving students as a Mount Oread Scholar.  Additionally, she was awarded a substantial amount of scholarship money and other financial aid, which would pay about 70% of her college expenses.  KU is respectably ranked at 101 among engineering schools in the US.

Meredith College was a late entry into the selection process.  There were several appealing things about Meredith College.  For one, it is an all girls private college, and is ranked in the top three private colleges in the South.  As a small private college, the class sizes are much smaller than they are at a place like KU, too.  Additionally, her mentor at Meredith would be a successful woman who has worked in the same field as her chosen major.  Meredith College offers a dual degree program in cooperation with North Carolina State University.  In that program, Kaity could get a liberal arts degree in Chemistry and a Chemical Engineering degree with a a focus on alternative energy from NC State.  For those keeping score, NC State is ranked in the top 35 engineering programs in the US.  Yeah.  Finally, Meredith offered Kaity enough financial aid to cover 90% of her college expenses, where about 90% of that award is scholarships.  Plus, it’s local.  She could live at home and attend Meredith and NC State.

After discussing her options and helping her weigh the pros and cons of each choice, we all agreed the decision seemed pretty easy.  We’re proud to announce Kaity has decided to attend Meredith College beginning this fall.  Kris and I are over the moon.  I perhaps moreso than Kris, as I have the pleasure of claiming one to the engineering clan.  Yay.  (Just 3 more to go ).

I am so proud of her, and excited about what lies ahead for her.

She’s currently in the middle of her last semester of high school, and busy filling out applications for various scholarships and colleges.  After this semester, she will have completed all of the requirements for the Kansas State Scholars Curriculum, which is recommended for students who plan to further their education. She’s decided she wants to be a chemical engineer, and learn how to develop alternative energy technologies. She’s applied to KU, OU, NCSU, and Meredith.

All of the state schools have great chemical engineering programs, and Meredith, a private women’s college in Raleigh, has a cooperative agreement with NCSU to offer a dual degree program where students earn a BA in chemistry from Meredith and a BS in chemical engineering from NCSU.

Her ACT scores were high enough to qualify her for some scholarship money at KU, and we’re waiting to hear from the other schools, who had later application dates. Hard to believe my baby is going to be a college freshman next year, but I couldn’t be prouder of the young woman she has become.

 
More updates soon. Promise!

While we were in North Carolina in December, he had an in-person interview with a company in Research Triangle Park, and had a formal job offer the week after we returned. We have managed to find a lovely house to rent, and a nice in-home daycare for Charlie in 2.5 days. Not much of a vacation, since many of the houses on our list were either already rented, too small, had cat doors in all of the bedrooms, or some combination thereof. We spent our evenings at Carol’s Garden Inn in Durham, a lovely century old farmhouse, with much-appreciated upgrades like Jacuzzi tubs.

In the meantime, we decided that since we would likely be moving in the middle of Kaity’s senior year, we enrolled her in a virtual school.  She can finish out the year and graduate from a Kansas high school, and the whole family can move at the same time, rather than me going out early and Brandon staying here with the girls until the end of the school year.

We spent the last few months of 2011 packing up the house, cramming in all the quality time we could with Brae and Hannah (who we won’t see again until summer), and off-loading as much stuff as possible. We had two garage sales, made half a dozen trips to Half-Price books, dropped a couple of carloads of kids’ stuff at a consignment shop downtown, and several more carloads at Good Will. The stuff that was too big to transport we listed on Craigslist and Freecycle. Hopefully everything that’s left will fit in a 20′ U-Haul.

For us, 2011 has been about wrapping up the old and preparing for new opportunities.  We will miss the dear friends we have made in Lawrence, and the family that will now be even farther away, but we look forward to having them visit, and to sharing our adventures as we start this new phase of our lives.

Things have been crazy busy around here, and there’s a lot of news.  Most of the immediate family knows most of it by now, but Nana pointed out this week that there are other people who might like to know what is going on here in Lawrence. Susan, this post is for you.

So, where to start. Let’s back up to August 2009.  I started a postdoc position at the medical center in Kansas City two months after finishing my doctorate, and 6 weeks after Charlie was born. One of the requirements of my fellowship was that I earn an additional master’s degree, either a Masters in Public Health or a Master of Science in Clinical Research. Because the second degree had a biostatistics track, that was the one I chose, since I thought it would be more applicable to my long term career goals. For the last 2.5 years, I have been taking additional classes in biostatistics and epidemiology, and had my last final exam in Advanced Epidemiological Methods (Poisson regression and Survival Analysis) yesterday.  I defended my thesis last week, and with exception of a few revisions, the requirements for my degree are done, or will be by Friday.

Another requirement of my postdoc was that I learn how to write grants, and apply for independent funding for my research. My postdoc position had been funded by a training grant which ended this summer, which was not renewed in the most recent funding cycle. I had applied for several small internal research grants and mentored training grants during my fellowship, the most recent one in July. Of 33 original applicants, my application was one of 10 selected for committee review. Great! I knew people who didn’t make the first cut, so I was optimistic that my pilot project would be funded and this new grant would cover my salary for a couple of years while providing some additional training in bioinformatics.

Of the 10 proposals selected for review, six were funded.  Mine was not one of them.  I heard later that some of the criticisms of my proposal were that it was not in my primary mentor’s area (true) and that I had no publications in the area in which I was proposing to work (also true). And neither something I could fix in my current position. It was a translational proposal, meaning that it pulled together basic and clinical sciences, with me being the basic science person and my mentor being the clinical science person.  Turns out most of the funded proposals went to clinicians or junior faculty who were working on extensions of their mentor’s projects.

The upshot of all this was that my funding was running out soon, and the chances of my department being able to cover me for another year were not good. So I started looking for a new job, something that would be a better fit for me professionally, and maybe also allow me to qualify for the loan repayment program through NIH.

At the end of August, I flew to Chapel Hill for an interview with a team of epidemiologists who work on cardiovascular disease genetics.  Using genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of large data sets (~20,000 subjects, long-term cohort studies where participants are followed for years), they try to tease out genetic risk factors for heart disease and obesity.  In October, I accepted a postdoc position at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health to work with data from the Add Health project, a long-term cohort study of adolescent health started in 1994.  We will be leaving Lawrence and setting up house in North Carolina in January (I’m writing part of this post from the airport, waiting on the flight to Raleigh to scope out potential housing).

This is a tremendous opportunity for me, to learn how to analyze big genomic data sets, something that no one at my current institution does, or even has the potential to do in the next several years.

Brandon has started looking for a new job, and has been contacted by several recruiters and had a few interviews. His current employer has agreed to keep him on as a remote employee for a while, to give him time to find a job in NC, and also give his team mate time to enjoy her brand new baby, who was born December 6. She’s on maternity leave until March.  Brandon’s replacement will start soon, giving him a chance to get familiar with the Linux systems  before we leave.

***

So that’s what’s new with us. Considering the length of this post, I’ll save the kid updates for next time.

On this day two years ago, Charlie was welcomed into the world.  Since then, she’s grown so much.  Remember when she got her first tooth?  She started pulling up?  Or when she walked the first time?  Now she talks in complete sentences.

We took Charlie to Culver’s for her birthday lunch.  We redeemed some vouchers Kris has been collecting and got Concretes for everyone.  Afterwards, we went grocery shopping.  Once we’d unloaded everything, we watched a few episodes of Bones.  We took a break to go to the Library and turn in everyones’ Summer Reading Program logs.  While we were out, we went to the toy store downtown and picked out a baby stroller for Charlie.

For dinner, we cooked Fake Stroganoff, which Charlie enjoys immensely.  For dessert, we went to the Cupcake Construction Company.

We watched another episode of Bones after dinner.

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I finished the front yard and took the tire to the neighbors to reset the tire on the rim and air it up (his air compressor is much bigger than mine).  By this time, it was the heat of the day, so I will finish the mowing tomorrow.  We went to India Palace for lunch, then came home and watched several episode of Bones.  For dinner, we tried a new 30-Minute Suppers recipe, a new twist on Broccoli, Chicken, and Rice Casserole.  The twists are that it uses Parmesan cheese and Dijon mustard in the sauce.  It was interesting.  We’re going to play with the recipe and see if we can make it awesome.  After dinner, we watched one more episode of Bones, then I went to work for our regularly scheduled monthly maintenance night.  As I write this, it is nearly midnight, and they are almost finished with the last item before I can put my systems back into normal operation.

So, Kris and I dropped Charlie off at the babysitters this morning and went to Milton’s for breakfast.  We were so stuffed that we ended up going to Juice Stop for lunch because we still weren’t hungry.  Our showing started at 1:30 PM.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was a good movie, pretty true to the book.  After the movie, we both had bad headaches (probably a combination of the heat and light lunch), so we went home for aspirin before going to get Charlie.  We took a short nap, then gathered Kaity up and went to get Charlie for an early dinner.  We had Mad Greek for dinner, then came home and watched a few episodes of Bones.