Wednesday, November 5 was my last day as a senior post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington. We went out to Lydia’s Last Lunch at Serafina with current and past lab members. I had some delcious trout, and they gave me a lovely card:

“thank-you for all your help and for answering all my questions… thank you for teaching me awesome Australian words: arvo! I will miss you! You’ve always had a smile and a kind word to share. You know how to distract me when I’m nervous (i.e. you let me rattle on about my cats)… we’ll miss you.. We are sad to see you go!… I have enjoyed and learned a lot from our many conversations… Thanks for all your support to me, especially when things have not been going the best. Your positive attitude and kindness have been very helpful so many times.”

I may never again walk through the university library, watch the squirrels hide and recover acorns, see the mountain behind the fountain, celebrate a birthday with cake, or a paper with sparkling apple juice. We have made so many wonderful friends here in Seattle. Now I am leaving my career at the bench behind, and looking forward to a rewarding future in clinical trials.

Here are the people with whom I have been working with for the past 18 months. I especially admire the grad students. Here in the US, people generally work as technicians for a few years before starting grad school, a process that takes 5 – 7 years. So I am actually younger than all the PhD candidates in the lab. Still, they keep at it every day, and don’t seem to be in any rush to leave. They always have time to listen to my stories or look at my data, and work at their science with a smile.

And this is the view from our lab: