Hey everyone,

Turns out waiting for mink to stain leaves you with quite a bit of time to work on other stuff... and think about the future.

We started December with the final touches to manuscript 2, which ended up looking pretty neat, if I might say so myself, so we braved submitting it to Scientific Reports! Nature-adjacent baby! Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves and wait on a decision from the journal. Fingers crossed!

With that done, it was time to start thinking about the future beyond MINKS. I know, I know, you all are gonna miss this updates soooo much xD

In all seriousness though, I attended a grant writing bootcamp organized by the Research Champions here at York Uni. A LOT of interesting stuff and good insight on how to prepare strong grant applications. I was lucky enough to pitch my project ideas to Prof Jane K. Hill who, besides having an outstanding career, has extensive experience on grant applications for NERC (the non-med bio branch of UKRI). After utterly crushing my ideas, she urged me to think bigger. And I did. And I think I came up with a couple of great ideas for my future research*. So thanks Prof Hill!

Other than that, after the winter break I've been mostly working on my second assessment for PGCAP, which looks like it's gonna take way more effort than originally intended...

Oh! And I've also been to Spain! Twice. First time was expected, as you might have realized by now that the winter holidays always involve a trip home for me. But the second... well, let's say I got some unexpected news which also left me contemplating the future...

And speaking of the future! I'm gonna have to stop rambling, as I need to start preparing for a bunch of trips this month! First is Bristol next week, where Liz will scan our already-infused minks so that we can look at their muscle anatomy. Then I'll finally get to visit the collections at the Natural History Museum in London (NHMUK), a trip I will share with Sophia, who will be scanning scapulae for her PhD**. Finally, I'll go back to Spain to get rid of this weight in my head...

Until next update,

Eloy

* For now, I'll refer to them by their codenames, RALIC and ARBEVO, but hopefully I'll be able to share more about them in the future.

** Did I tell you all that I'm cosupervising a PhD student with Phil? Well, that's her. She's great :)