We just finished a site visit from the Department of Homeland Security. We teamed with seven other universities and submitted a proposal to be the fifth DHS Center of Excellence. We'd be focusing on preparedness for and response to high consequence events. We've seen quite a bit of this recently, with mudslides, hurricanes and other natural disasters, as well as the human-generated events of recent history. We've had a lot of experience from the response side and we are teaming with some really brilliant researchers at the other universities, so I think we are well positioned for this proposal. I hope the site visitors thought the same.

I was not presenting or anything -- we hosted the event, so I and the other grad students have been preparing for this since we found out about the visit, and have been scrambling this week to make sure the event went as smoothly as possible. For us this meant making sure the A/V equipment was set up correctly, copying slides, assembling binders, doing last-minute fact-checking, and so on.

It was also very nice to finally put some faces to some names of people I was aware of via publications and reputation. Jeff Bradshaw from IHMC was also in -- we've worked together a bit over the past year or so -- but we barely had time to say hello and chat for a few minutes. The work that I am doing for my PhD ties in with work his interests and I wanted to have a chance to talk over some of it with him. Guess email will have to do...

So after the first half of the week being 12-16 hour days, it was nice to relax and recover a bit today. Unfortunately I got to deal with administrative hassles today -- like trying to figure out why I couldn't access my health insurance account to print this year's id card and why I won't get paid for August until September. Grrr....