illuminating science

For those of you who’ve just joined us, I’m doing a PhD in physiscs at the University of Queensland in Australia. I’m in my third, and hopefully final, year, which means I’ve got to start getting ready to write up. Ultimately, I’m going to have a big, thick book of work which describes in great detail what I’ve been working on for the last three years. The actual details I’ll save for another post (can’t use up all my ideas at once!) but it’s about trying to make simple models to understand very complex biological systems. We’d like to use techniques from other areas of physics to understand things in biology like photosynthesis and how our eyes detect light. Believe it or not, there’s lots of interesting things there which aren’t very well understood at all!

Anyway, I made my first steps today when I completed the Table of Contents for my thesis. Basically, this meant deciding on what the chapters are going to be, and what sections and subsections are going to be in each chapter. It actually feels remarkably good to have done that - each section doesn’t look anywhere like as challenging as the thesis as a whole did.

Of course, I’m not quite telling the truth - I’ve actually been working on writing up my thesis in bits and pieces as I go - summarising one paper or another, writing an introduction to photosynthesis, or writing papers about my work for submission to journals. So I’ve actually got quite a lot of stuff written already - I just now need to start making it all come together.

And even if it’s 90% blank space, my official thesis page count is now at 21 pages!

Tomorrow and Saturday, I’m off to a conference in Sydney. I’m not sure if there’ll be internet there or not, so I may not be able to post for a couple of days, but if there is I’ll try and write about what interesting things I come across! Otherwise, have a good weekend!