The year of 2020

It is an unusually year. Chauncey and I have been working from home since March. We actually really enjoy the working mode (no commute, no traffic, no need to pickup Ian) for the past 10 months. We'd like to appreciate for many things from many aspects including raising Ian and both of our career developments.

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Ian:

• It is a happy year for Ian since he doesn't need to go to school.
• He can do whatever he wants to have fun and cheer himself up, like drawing pictures, playing legos, learning animal dinosaur facts, watching Wild Kratts and other videos.
• He found himself really liking drawing and coloring, and started to like spelling words. He likes telling stories much more than doing math.
• He learned riding bicycle this summer and now he can ride very fast!
• He has learned to be more independent. For example, he respects dad and mom's working time and can play by himself for hours. And then he can express his needs better than before.

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Fan:

Brief summary of this year:

• One first author paper in review, and one co-first author paper in review: these exposed myself in the field of computational immunology in innate immunity.
• Published 4 co-author papers including New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Experimental & Molecular Medicine
• Gave 4 faculty job talks: built up my confidence, had a more clear vision of my next five years work, and learned to visualize myself as I want to be.
• Published several conference abstracts: conference abstracts are not very helpful due to the COVID-19.
• Resubmit a NIH grant proposal, but still didn't get it. I do get a much better score and very close. I had struggled in how to improve my grant writing skills, which bothered myself almost two months of this year.
• Peer reviewed 4 papers

Self-reflection and improvement：

• Good collaborations across sites help build up network and reputation
• Helping others does build up my own confidence
• Be ambitious and independent for my future plans
• Translate my own/professional language into a plain language that all your audience with diverse backgrounds can understand you

New year's wish list:

• Aim to submit two more first author papers to end my two ongoing projects by next summer
• Aim to transit to a principal investigator
• Probably percent my time into: 50% independent, 40% collaboration, and 10% consulting/team scientist
• Improve my negotiation skills

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Chauncey:

Brief summary of this year:

• Published one co-first author Nature Medicine paper: this really helps Chauncey transit into the fields of system biology and infectious diseases. I am impressed by his amazing work - how he can adapt his computational expertise in a totally new field in just one year?
• Published one co-author Cell paper
• One co-first author paper in review

Self-reflection:

• Chauncey has been working on many projects and almost overwhelmed. But he learned a lot on multi-task management, and from there found out his desired future research areas.*

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Our family has a new adventure, which has become our family tradition - hiking! Why hiking is so freaking good? We hiked with our friends every Saturday afternoon between 1pm to 4pm. We enjoy walking, hiking, and sharing our experience across different mountains at Massachusetts, including blue hill, Wachusett mountain, Lynn woods, middlesex mountain, White mountain, and so on. The maples in fall were so beautiful that we will never forget these if we move to another city one day in future!

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We all appreciate His grace and wisdom to help us have an accomplished and joyful year. Of course we would like to give special thanks to the wrong decisions and unhappy moments this year, which lead us to seek more wisdom, build more confidence and just look forward to the new coming year, because "There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind (from C.S. Lewis)"!

Fan
2020-12-26
Newotn, MA