And it is... Biophysics!

Hi folks, apologies for my prolonged absence, though I don't think many people missed me! During the last year or two, I finally passed my qualifying exam (which now makes me an official PhD candidate), and settled in a research lab. I've also got around making my lab website look better (see csb.stanford.edu/~adelene/), though I'm also trying to learn more about web design, so things might look more different there along the way.

Research has also decided to take the form of Biophysics, which is sort of an in-between science, in my opinion. For a long while the biological sciences and the physical sciences took on different tracks, but these days a lot more physicists are going into biology research, to try to apply physical principles to understanding biological phenomena. But admittedly we all know biology is highly complex. Hopefully from understanding simplified models, we can build up towards a more holistic understanding of biology.

There are several subcategories of Biophysics (see for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophysics), and I'm coming from the structural biology approach, trying to understand nucleic acid (mainly RNA) structure by combining the use of experiments and computer simulations. I think, at the end of the day, it is essential to merge the two methods, to have experiments guide simulations and vice versa, in order to elucidate the complex principles behind biology!