New beginnings and old friends

Hi, there!

If you are reading this, that means I finally got over my fear of posting and managed to hit publish. (Which is something I've thought about for some time but have never gotten around to for one excuse or another.) So glad to have you here.

I hope to use this blog to commemorate thing going on in my life, in my research, and as a place to post helpful advice when I feel it's warranted. I won't claim to be an academic guru (I still don't fully understand tenure or the difference between a scholar and a fellow) but I feel that it's my job to share any tips I would've wanted on my path to getting where I am now.

Where is that, you may ask? Well I am ecstatic to announce that as of February 2025, I am officially a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle! This has been a major change for me, as I spent my whole life (all 27 years of it) in North Carolina and had never seriously considered moving. However, I am pleased to say that the Pacific Northwest has been a gorgeous and exciting change. My partner, John, and I packed up our townhome in Raleigh, NC in December 2024 and drove the nearly 3,000 miles to our new home in the Green Lake neighborhood of Seattle. While I could bore you with the details of the drive and how it felt to move so far from what I've always known, I'll just say this instead- change is an exciting, scary, beautiful, horrifying thing that is greatly influenced by your perspective of it. At times I am terrified, but more often I find myself in awe of the incredible city, people, job and life I have here. So I can say with a modest amount of confidence that you shouldn't always be afraid to jump.

As far as my new postdoc position- I will share more on that in a coming post but I will say that, similar to my doctoral research, I am still looking at aquatic invertebrate physiology, with primary interest in salinity and ammonium balance. Expect to see more mosquitoes, amphipods and (hopefully) mayflies in the near future.

All the best,

Jamie