Attending JSM Conference 2016 in Chicago

This weekend I'm headed to Chicago to the big, annual conference for statisticians in North America: the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). I'll be there Sunday through Wednesday afternoon and I'm giving a talk on Tuesday in Session #405 titled 'Statistical Challenges in the Analysis of Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data'. In preparation for the conference, I started a set of notes on GitHub of the sessions I'm mostly interested in attending. As I attend various sessions, I'll add more notes of software, papers and links from the talks.  Looking forward to catching up with some old friends and meeting new friends!

Boston or Bust

This past week Chris and I celebrated our first month of being official Bostonians.  For those who don't know, while finishing my PhD at Rice this spring, I accepted a postdoctoral research fellow position starting in August in Rafael Irizarry's lab in the Biostatistics & Computational Biology department at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with a joint appointment in the Harvard School of Public Health.  Since graduating in May, this summer has been such a whirlwind of events.  We did quite a bit of traveling in July and spent about a week driving from Texas to Massachusetts.  Some additional good news is Chris just finished his second week at his new job as a Validation Engineer at Bose!  Now that things are starting to settle down a bit, I decided to show some highlights of our trip and a few fun outings we have had exploring around Boston.

To begin, I will be upfront and say no matter how you move, moving is a pain in the butt.  The only part of moving I liked was seeing the 'Podzilla' move the POD around!  Seriously, it's one of the coolest things. :)

We began our very long drive by stopping to visit some family members in Texas & Louisiana.

Next up was Mississippi.  We only spent a short time there, but we found Elvis who sang our blues away about leaving such good friends and family behind.

In Tennessee we stopped at Corky's BBQ for some 'Memphis-style' BBQ which consisted of ribs with a very dry rub & an enormous amount of sauce on top.  I think I prefer North Carolina or Texas style BBQ, but overall it was a good experience! 

Next up was West Virgina, Maryland & Pennsylvania.  We had a wonderful time staying with some of my family in PA!  At the end of the night, we even enjoyed some s'mores under the beautiful Pennsylvania night sky. I can't remember the last time I made s'mores over a real fire pit, but it is something I wish I could do more often.

The next day, we drove through Dallas, PA where my dad grew up!  This is a picture of the house when my dad lived there:

And this was the picture the day we drove by.  So pretty!

The next day was New York, Connecticut & finally Massachusetts!  After our 1900+ mi drive, we rewarded ourselves with clam chowder the night we arrived.  We're determined to find the best new england clam chowder in Boston, so suggestions are welcomed.  

Since arriving in Boston, we've spent most of our time settling into the new apartment, but we have made a few excursions to explore the city.  We've tried a pretty famous local BBQ place called Blue Ribbon BBQ and found some very excited LSU alumni fans!  One of my favorite outings has been to visit Cape Cod. On our drive there, we saw so many windmills!   The beaches were also phenomenal.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep documenting a few of our adventures.  :) 

Visit to Fredericksburg and Luckenbach, TX

This weekend I went to visit Fredericksburg, TX with a good friend of mine for her birthday!  We had that 'Girls Getaway' kind of weekend and stayed in the most adorable bed & breakfast / cottage.

During our stay, we visited some lovely shops including a yarn shop, fudge shop and a pretty authentic German restaurant with some delicious schnitzel!  Below is schnitzel covered in a mushroom sauce.

Here is some heavenly fried chicken covered in a honey pecan sauce

We visited some wineries:

and also made a very brief stop in Luckenbach, TX (definitely worth a quick google if you aren't familiar with it). Yes, the one with Willie, Waylon and the boys. :)

Overall, it was was a FANTASTIC trip!  Would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a relaxing weekend in the Texas hill country.  Hope you had an awesome birthday in your awesome birthday tiara!

A Weekend Adventure in College Station

This past weekend my dad and I traveled to College Station, TX to visit my sister, Vanessa Hicks, and her boyfriend, Cory Laird.  She's a first year PhD student at Texas A&M and has very little time to cook.  Therefore, I offered to come help her learn a few quick healthy recipes and then cook up many more meals that I froze.

Since the Oscars were on Sunday, we also decided to catch up on a few of the nominated movies.  Here we were watching the lovely Brad Pitt in Moneyball.  A very good movie especially since it was about stats (and baseball). :)

Instead of posting all the pictures, I made a quick collage with Picasa of many of the dishes we bought/made.

Things we made that are pictured above include a spinach cheesy pasta and cabbage soup in the crockpot, turkey burgers, 13 rolls of sushi (yes, 13!), a louisiana gumbo (recipe from Pirate's Pantry)

We went out to eat at Blue Baker, The Lemon Wedge, and Sweet Eugene's in College Station and Bryan, TX.

Here's a list of everything else we made that is not shown in the picture above:
- lemon pie from The Lemon Wedge (delicious!)
- hummus
- salmon
- mojitos
- and green juices

I'd say our weekend was a great success!