This summer has been great - lots of science and writing getting done as things have quieted down with the end of the school year. That said, it has been a bit bittersweet — three of our core lab members, Ralph Peterson (NE Co-op, then technician), Dan Bear (former grad student, now postdoc), and Paul Greer (postdoc) are moving on to the next stages of their career and so are leaving the lab. Ralph is moving to San Francisco to work on a start-up that aims to help move IP from the lab into the real world (although he will be working part-time remotely to help finish up some really interesting behavioral work he started). Dan is going to be a postdoc in Dan Yamins lab at Stanford (http://web.stanford.edu/~yamins/); although I predict some cracking open convolutional neural nets is in his future, the great thing about science is that you never know what is next. Paul is starting his own lab at U. Mass Worcester, which is an amazing achievement. He was the very first postdoc in the lab, helped define who we are and what we do, and it is terrific to see how much his toolbox has expanded now that he is going off to do great things on his own. All will be deeply missed.
To celebrate all of this, and to celebrate the (final and formal) awarding of degrees to Tari and Dan, we decided to go bowling. It should be no surprise that it got competitive. It should be even less surprising that the degree of trash talking was not related to actual performance.
