by Rachel Oidtman Here, we will be hosting a (roughly) monthly blog, written by various members of the Perkins Lab, with commentary on conferences, teaching methods, random musings in the world of disease modeling / ecology / statistics / epidemiology, and more. Once Alex and I agreed that a lab blog would be fun, and would not take time away from our research, we decided to have a lab meeting to see what the rest of the lab thought. During the lab meeting, we agreed on the goal of our blog as setting up a forum to communicate topics falling in our area of research (mathematical modeling of infectious disease) and other topics closely related to that. Another goal is to disseminate other interesting ideas to people both inside and outside of the academic world. Although we do hope the blog will serve as a tool for outreach (and we will write posts geared more toward outreach), this is not our primary goal in starting this blog. Housed in an integrated Biological Sciences department, members of our lab have backgrounds that range from ecology to statistics and mathematics to engineering and geography. This diversity allows us to have both diverging and converging opinions, which we believe will lead to a constructive, interesting, and fun blog. With a different member of the lab contributing each month, you will get a taste of our interests, personalities, and writing styles. At the same time, we will aim for consistent quality of writing by having one other member of the lab peer review a blog post before we share it. We are excited to start this venture, and hope you enjoy what’s to come. Check out the slides from our lab meeting for more background on our motivations and goals.
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