saturated

I am utterly saturated with information, ideas, and new connections.  It is my third week at a month-long workshop in physics and immunology, and each day has two talks and discussions lasting usually almost two hours each.  In between, we usually go to lunch and talk more physics and immunology, then maybe talk to someone else in their office about our personal interests.  Another talk, a bit of work, dinner with other program participants, then bike home and sleep... wash, rinse, and repeat.

It is super intense and amazing.  My knowledge of immunology is finally beginning to be integrated.  I love the way that physicists ask questions and think about problems.  I love they way they think, and how the experimentalists who come are also quantitative, acquainted with modeling, and understand why we all want to measure parameters.

It's also nice that I actually can for once explain something to someone.  I know the basics of biology and immunology, and as it turns out familiarity with enzyme kinetics-style equations is quite handy because almost every interaction involves something binding to something else and beginning a process. While I certainly do not know all the techniques or equations I have seen at the workshop, it is at least within the realm of my experience. It is one thing not to understand something, and another to not have any idea why!  Here, I often do not understand, but my fellow graduate students and post-docs are great about explaining and giving me an intuitive idea for what is going on.

So it has been lots of fun to meet basically a third of the entire field of people working on modeling immunology, getting an idea of the questions being asked and approaches to answer them, and even more importantly what is not being worked on.  My sense is that the modeling that has been done covers a very small slice of the questions in immunology, but it is a struggle because much of the data comes from in vivo experiments and as such is very messy with large error bars.