El cajon de abril

My first nephew was born today!! Ethan Tyler McKell. He came early this morning just before my mom left Vancouver... so it looks like she really lucked out! Hopefully I'll get to see him in May for the blessing...

Plus more exciting news: Clemson University made me an offer today! Yeah, I later decided to check out pictures of campus on the internet. The scenery is gorgeous! It's up in the mountains and right next to a huge lake! (Check it out on google maps :)

So now I have Wake Forest and Clemson to decide between, plus Brandeis U (pronounced bran-"dice") which should let me know their decision in a week or two. It'll be tough to beat Brandeis though.. for example, they just received extensive grant money from the National Science Foundation to establish a Material Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC grant). You can read more about it here:

http://www.brandeis.edu/mrsec/index.html
http://mrsec.org/centers/brandeis-university/

http://thehoot.net/articles/3540

http://www.brandeis.edu/now/2008/september/mrsec.html

Last year I found out about the cool stuff going on in cell biology and physics, and since then have been totally hooked! The neat thing is that four of the biggest names in this area (according to what I can tell) are somehow all connected to Brandeis: Dr. Azadeh Samadani is a professor at Brandeis, Dr. Arpita Upadhyaya (a professor at Maryland) did her postdoc with Dr. Samadani at MIT where they worked together on some big-time papers, Dr. Margaret Gardel (a professor at Chicago) has a postdoc from Brandeis in her lab, and Dr. Jay Tang (a professor at Brown) did his PhD at Brandeis! Cool, huh?! Here are links to their websites if your interested:

http://www.brandeis.edu/azadeh/

http://www2.physics.umd.edu/~arpitau/
http://squishycell.uchicago.edu/index.html

http://biophysics.physics.brown.edu/

..plus living in Boston would be way awesome, I won't lie :)