G’day.

After reading about my exploits elsewhere Li Kim Lee kindly offered to host my weblog on Nature Network. This sounded like a great wheeze to me, so here I am.

Let’s have a little intro. I am a 30-something perennial postdoc, British by upbringing but currently living and working in Sydney, Australia. I did my doctoral work in Oxford, had a brief stint in industry and about 18 months ago left the MRC Lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge after a somewhat extended stay. I have one wife, two children and about three thousand songs in my iTunes collection. You’ll probably find out more about me as time goes by.

My other, pseudonymous (isn’t that a great word?) weblog details day-to-day happenings in the ‘Cage’, one of the departments of the University of Sydney. I firmly believe that scientists, especially publicly-funded scientists, have a duty to communicate with the rest of the world, and the Labrats — incidentally approved (at least in principle) by the Head of School and part of a USyd initiative — is a pretty down-and-dirty way of doing that. Here, because I’m writing under my real name and because I suspect most readers will know what being a scientist is like anyway, I intend to be a little more ‘philosophical’, perhaps a little less specific about actual events.

We’ll see. The only promise I’ve made is that this place will be, primarily, about science and research. Let the games begin!