While my wife Harriet recovers from a broken ankle, I’ve had a bit of extra time to work on projects at home. So I’ve begun working on the director’s overview portion of the CCSG competitive renewal. While I’m at an extraordinarily early stage of working through that section, it’s already clear to me that the Lombardi not only survived, but in fact thrived over the past six years, due in large part to the great people that work here. For example, our total funding grew from about $70 million in 2002 to roughly $100 million by early this year. While our very solid foundation of excellence won’t make it any easier to write the competitive renewal (it is an awful lot of work, as you know), we will have great stories to tell the reviewers.
I really enjoyed this week’s Faculty Research Seminar by Chris Loffredo. (I guess the weekly seminars will be a theme in my blog posts.) He spoke about gender differences in bladder cancer, and I thought it was remarkable to see the broad range of disciplines that are represented at Lombardi. I was particularly struck by his openness to and interest in developing collaborations across disciplinary boundaries. I guess I’m also a little jealous of him because he gets to deal with a completely different type of red tape when doing his studies than the rest of us have to deal with here in DC.
The other thing that I wanted to share is that I’ll be on vacation next week with my family in Long Beach Island and I promised that I would spend no more than two hours each day on email. So I hope everybody will be kind in my absence and keep your emails down to a torrent.