Colorado Conference

I spent the last week in Denver, Colorado at the Gait & Clinical Movement Analysis Society (GCMAS) annual conference ... I know it is a mouthful. We had a big group from Stanford attending as we ran a tutorial on the OpenSim software and four of us gave podium presentations during the week. I gave a presentation on Thursday entitled, "Accelerations produced by the gastrocnemius and soleus during crouch gait" ... basicallly it was about how we can use dynamic simulations to understand the role of individual muscles during common movement disorders in cerebral palsy. The conference was hosted by the Denver Children's Hospital where I used to work which added another fun component to the conference as I got to visit with them and see their new gait lab at the new hospital.


After the conference my parents came up to Denver for a visit on Saturday. We went to the old house of the "unsinkable Molly Brown" from the Titanic (... it turns out her actual name was Margaret or Maggy but Molly sounded better in the Hollywood song). However, the real excitement came in the afternoon when my mom and I went indoor sky-diving. Basically it is a huge wind-tunnel turned on end. Air rushes up allowing you to float and move around. It was enough work for me to just figure out how to get stable and move forward and backward but our instructor could do flips, dives, and a ton of tricks. It was a ton of fun and although it is expensive I would recommend it to anyone to try once.

Elephant Seals

Each winter elephant seals invade the beach at Ano Nuevo State Park, about a half-hour south of Half Moon Bay to breed. Last year we went down in the middle of March to go on one of the guided tours of the beach but had missed most of the seals and only saw a few of the remaining babies. Today we went with a group of fellow graduate housing CAs, just about a week before we went last year, and saw a ton of seals! The male elephant seals are huge but I don't think a saw a single one move the whole time we were there ... they look like they are dead on the beach. I found the baby seals more entertaining as they slowly waddled across the sand barking at one another and trying out their swimming skills in the small tide pools on the beach.

Next year we hope to go in late January/early February when the beach is supposed to be completely packed with elephant seals and the males are fighting with one another. Supposedly you have to book in October to get on one of these tours but I think it would be worth it.

Ph.D. Candidate

As many of you know I've spent way too many hours over the last month studying for my PhD Qualifying Exam which is the last hoop before becoming an "official" PhD candidate. I'm happy to report that I had my exam Friday morning at 8:30 and passed! It is an all oral exam that starts with a talk on your research before getting quizzed on topic areas by four professors. Although some questions surprised me a bit and left me searching my brain for a few minutes, I was amazed by how fast the two hours went by. It ended up actually being a fun experience, minus all the stress leading up to it, and now I'm very ready to move on to other things.

As for the last month in which I have been MIA we have still been able to find a bit of time for adventures around studying. We had quite a few visitors during the month of February including Bryan and Caryn Carruthers who spent a weekend visiting from Colorado and Dan's mom who finally made her first trip down from Northern California to visit our tiny apartment. Unfortunately this has also been the rainiest month since we moved to California which dampened some of the "touristy" plans but we still enjoyed taking tours of the campus, visiting the coast in Santa Cruz, and taking some hikes around the area.

Along with the rainy weather Dan and I have also ventured to the coast a few times to watch the big waves that the storms have brought in.
We've also been playing lots of sports like usual. I'm proud to announce that Dan is the Barnes ping-pong singles champion (after beating me in the finals .... grrr) and our lab volleyball team has made it to the quarterfinals so far.

It seems like I'm always saying this but I can't believe that February is already over and another quarter is almost gone! I'm just happy to be done with my qualifying exam and am looking forward to a little time of relaxation over the coming weeks.