Hey guys, I mentioned that I am on sabbatical from July till the end of December, 2013. I will elaborate. For a number of reasons I chose not to leave Toronto but to stay here and concentrate on something that is totally new to me. With this in mind, I joined SGC (Al Edwards, its director, is an old friend of mine).  Here is their website:

http://www.thesgc.org/scientists/groups/toronto

I now work with Elena Dobrovetsky. She is awesome. I am learning a ton about protein crystallography, all the way from expression to mounting of crystals and data collection. I will be posting my progress reports. Just 2 weeks ago we set up 960 crystallizations of some epigenetic domains (more on that later) and got some really nice crystals already (actually only one condition delivered – attrition was high). My ultimate goal is fragment based screening using crystallography. This stuff is a ton of fun. I can hardly be found at my main office (Lash Miller Building), but I am fine with that – if you do a sabbatical, you may as well try to see that there really is a separation from your regular job. I asked my wife “Do you think my students miss me?” and she said “Ha ha ha! No way!!”. I suppose this is true… I am not sad though!