Haha, apparently, every year Tom tells everyone "Successful and Happy New Year! and in that order :)"

At our group meeting today, we had a new postdoc candidate come present his stuff as part of his interview day. He's from Germany, and he's currently a grad student with a PI who was one of Tom's "star students" from many years ago! Haha, pretty cool, all these connections! His presentation was really very good, and to imagine that came from a 4th year grad student (or maybe starting his 5th year this January, I think?) was pretty crazy. So much clean data, so much knowledge on his own project and all the publications in the field, what he wants to try next, what's questionable, etc.

His presentation was also very entertaining =):

"This protein structure, however, doesn't have the supercoiled helix motif as we imagined, and actually looks like a piece of tortellini."

"Here's a sausage diagram of the protein structure."

"It seems that the probability of getting a protein to crystalize is inversely proportional to our interest in their biological function!"    (how true!)

"... [trying to say "specifically" in the middle of a sentence towards the end of the presentation, getting tongue-tied]... speciFIca... speCIficity-ally... er, speciFIcality... erm, [reading off of the slide syllable-by-syllable] s-pe-ci-fi-cal-li-t... huh? ...you know what I mean! Anyway!..."

Haha, but as a non-native English speaker, I can attest to the fact that saying "specifically" vs "specificity" are very difficult!