After realizing that my last ten entries or so have ended in exclamation points (!!!), I figured I’d slow things down a bit with a brief discussion of my summer travel plans.

At the end of June I’ll be heading to Australia! (sorry…there’s really no way to announce a trip to Australia without involving exclamation points) I’ll be spending a few days up north in Cairns, seeing the Great Barrier Reef and visiting some of the surrounding rain forest, before heading down to Sydney for the main event: presenting a contributed talk at the “Galaxy Metabolism: Galaxy Evolution near and far” meeting.

Then, in mid-July, I’ll be flying to Chile, as I’m currently tentatively slated to observe at Magellan on July 16th and 17th, getting some follow-up observations for my thesis work. I’m very much looking forward to this observing run – Chile is always a beautiful place to visit, and Magellan was a joy to observe on last time. Hopefully last year’s wonderful experience will repeat itself and it’ll be another two days of excellent weather. (now excuse me while I go run and find some wood to knock on…)

The rest of the summer is shaping up to be quiet, or at least relatively so: I’m now officially in the fourth and final year of my PhD program, so this summer also marks the beginning of preparations for the fall job market!

On May 8th I attended the ARCS Honolulu awards banquet. It was another great chance to see the poster presentations of the other ARCS scholars and have more one-on-one discussions about all their research. I got to originally hear about these projects at the ARCS awards presentations on April 17th, and lots of them were fascinating – projects like studies of yellow tang genetics across the Pacific, beneficial bacteria on coral reefs in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, studying chemical and geological evidence left over from the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, and coding up the brain of a density-scanning robot using techniques like genetic programming and neural networks to conduct unmanned autonomous searches for land mines. As a kid who grew up glued to PBS specials, I was in full-on geek-out mode for both occasions. Man, science really is just downright cool.

Amazingly, enormous exploding stars held their own even in the company of cute yellow fish and life-saving robots: at the end of the banquet I was named the ARCS Scholar of the Year for the Honolulu chapter! It was a big surprise, and a big honor, and I’m very thankful to the members of ARCS Honolulu for selecting me as this year’s recipient. During the banquet several of the ARCS members were also honored for their contributions to the organization this year and over the years, and it was wonderful to learn more about these women who have led such interesting lives, traveling all over the world and finding their way to Hawaii in such unique and interesting ways, and who still devote their time and energy and resources to the support of science. It was a truly wonderful night, and I’m so glad I got to be a part of it!