Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

I was privileged enough to be asked to Ritsumeikan University  Shiga, Japan as an invited lecturer asked to give a series of lectures during their concentrated summer program. The theme of the lecture program was “brain pathologies and therapies.” Yes that is a broad topic, but they wanted personal expert presentations focusing on those areas [...]

Since the emotionally traumatic events of my thesis and thesis defense, requiring a re-write, it has become very clear to me that such things are extremely common. A thesis, journal articles and books all get proofread and are re-written routinely. My minor re-write and proving one assumption seemed to me at the time as a [...]

I called Ann and broke the bad news to her. I explained that it would not likely change my departure date for France, but the need to do the rewrite would make the next couple of weeks quite pressured and decrease our free time together. Fortunately a repeat of the oral thesis defense was not [...]

So goes the life of a scientist, because such succinct conclusions are not uncommon. I have since known several other Ph.D. thesis conclusions requiring years of work to arrive at a simple answer. One such student spent years studying the size of a part of a protein, called the catalytic cleft. The catalytic cleft is [...]

  Chapter 19. Leaving on a Jet Plane – This is the last Chapter people in 4 installments. I had three major fears concerning my postdoc in Paris. Fear number 1 was that a long-distance relationship between myself and Ann would not survive. Since she was planning to join me in 6 months or so, [...]

As far as I’m concerned if you have any aspirations of a future in emergency services of any sort, seeing my face on a podcast should be in your future.

The first day and a half for Renee was relatively low stress with just simple chats and lunch talks. During the first research discussion I had with Renee she made it clear that I was very welcome in her lab, that she expected me there in January (18 months from now) and that she had [...]

There were two pivotal meetings scheduled for Renee that could shape the perception of the success or failure of the trip. One was her talk to the Department of Physiology, and the second was a one-on-one meeting with Ron Myer. Dr. Myer was a known opponent of the compartmentation theory and Dr. Ventura-Clapier was a [...]

It was important for me to get a grant to support my research because the politics of higher education and research are an amalgam of the altruistic scientist who wants to do the greatest good for humankind and may put his or her life at risk to expand human knowledge, and the empire builder in [...]

Ann and I had many conversations about my putative plans to go to Paris to do my postdoctoral studies. She felt that she could not spend a whole year out of the country. She was close to her family and did not want to be away from them. Her pilot lessons were also going well [...]