Category: research

My current research

Midterms and oral reports

Midterm corrections are in full swing and finally I have to work weekends in order to get everything done in time. Not a pleasant thing to do given the gorgeous fall outside – mild temperatures and beautiful colours (it is Quebec after all!). Alas, marks have to be ready before the drop date (last day, when students can discontinue a course)! Additionally, oral reports for 3 lab experiments in Analytical Chemistry III have started and although I find these oral discussions extremely useful they are also taking up a good part of my time.

Midterm preparations

The first round of exams is not far away and I am busy preparing. In addition I gave a supplemental exam for CHEM-218 (Analytical Chemistry II) for students, who took the course back in the Winter term. The first assignments are done too and grading was nor too difficult, nor too long. That gives me hope that I will finish grading for the midterms in due time. 

Departmental and graduate student seminars are a welcome break from the routine – I get a good overview what kind of research  is done in the department and new input from external speakers. After all I keep on doing research.

Manuscript accepted

After some major reworking of our latest manuscript I am finally happy to announce that it was accepted and is now in press. Check out the STOTEN website – I will let you know, when it is available online. Here is the final title:

V. Cote, G. Kos, R. Mortazavi, P. A. Ariya, A Study of the Microbial Transformation of Malonic Acid and the Fungal Metabolites Produced “de novo” by Three Airborne Fungi, Science of the Total Environment (in press).

Last week …

… was the last of the fairly quiet ones. Assignments, midterms, etc are coming soon and preparation has already started. I had a nasty cold last week, a bit of a fever (so it seemed) and a deteriorating voice, which made teaching not too pleasant. I found to harder to focus with my cold symptoms, but because stress levels were not too high yet things were bearable (at least for me 😉

“The battlefield of higher education”

… as a colleague of mine put it – my first week of teaching is over and although I was fairly exhausted on Friday, it has been a lot of fun. Things have been off to a good start and I feel a lot more relaxed than last January. The framework for the courses I teach is established and I hope that I have made students interested by presenting some of my own work from the Arctic last year.

On a related note – I have submitted the revisions to STOTEN after a major rework of the manuscript. Although the suggested changes were rather minor, re-reading the text and checking some of the discussion caused us (i.e. the authors) to clarify some things even more than the reviewers had originally requested. We want to deliver a good paper and we think that the revised version is a significant improvement. I have also submitted 2 abstract to this year’s AGU fall meeting in San Francisco for Dec 2007, although I am not sure, if I will be able to attend with the exams happening at the same time.

Reviewer comments done (almost) …

I am almost done with responding to the reviewer comments of the latest manuscript. There are a few things left to clarify – mostly in the microbiological part and I am waiting for a couple of suggestions from one of the co-authors. Because it is summer, we got 6 weeks instead of the usual 4 to finish our review and it seems that we are going to need it.

Anyway I have redone the figures to make the error bars more visible and I have recalculated the counting error for the observed colony forming units in the graph displaying the metabolic activity of fungal species in the presence of dicarboxylic acids. More for you to read, when the paper is finally published.

Working on reviewer comments

Last week I have mostly worked on the reviewer comments for the “Science of the Total Environment” manuscript. Most changes were indeed easily done and for some more insight I have emailed a former colleague, who has worked on the cultivation of fungi, to get some insights on the details of the procedures; if I do not hear back from her, I have to plough through her lab books.

Reviewer 2 is two-thirds done. Reviewer 1 asked for additional references and a more detailed updated of previous work – so I should be able to do these changes too fairly easily.

Manuscript reviewer comments in

Paternity leave? Sort of … reviewer comments from a manuscript that I have submitted in January have now arrived:

V. Cote, G. Kos and P. A. Ariya, A Study of the Microbial Transformation of Malonic Acid and the Fungal Metabolites Produced “de novo” by Three Airborne Fungi: Aspergillus fumigatus, Aspergillus flavus, and Penicillium chrysogenum, Science of the Total Environment (2007, submitted)

I have to do a minor revision – not bad, most comments are very minor, but useful to improve the clarity of the text. There were no objections concerning the science and general framework of the manuscript, so this should be easy. I have to do the revision within 6 weeks to avoid a resubmission.

Paternity leave …

My daughter Sophie was born on June 16 and I am currently on paternity leave, enjoying our new family life. I use the precious time that is left for some small work on my manuscripts and I will start preparing lectures for the fall term next week.

The instructors, who have taught the lectures I will be teaching in fall in the past have generously offered me their notes; thus, I have a framework for both lectures making the preparation a little easier for me.