Where has the time gone?

How has it been so long since my last blog?! I think the past seven months have proceeded at a faster pace than the previous seven. Early on in the pandemic I found days seemingly endless, that coupled with being at home with a toddler who often wanted to 'help mommy work' was challenging, but filled with family time that I will always cherish. Since January 2020 my productivity seems to have increased, and I now feel a bit more on top of the continued telework situation we have at the Smithsonian. In the end of December 2020 a pandemic project I contributed to was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. This paper looks at a diversity of mammalian teeth, and correlates size to transcript data showing cascading effects on expression leading to teeth size/shape. 
https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaa331

Outside of this I've been making steady progress on a variety of projects from my PhD and postdoc, as well as grant applications and finalizing papers with my graduate student. 2021 is already turning out to be more optimistic than 2020 (not a hard bar to reach btw). I have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and am finishing up these long-overdue projects. 

While the National Museum of Natural History remains closed, I really hope that in the coming months we will reopen our doors to the public, and more widely to staff. I miss coming in everyday, and look forward to spending a great deal of time in the collections. Until then I'm going to focus on writing and finishing papers, and hopefully getting some funding for additional projects.