May 25

This is the summer I need to completely capitalize on. This may be my last chance to get a viable and vibrant research program up and running.

Pursue self-healing wetsuits.

Pursue the CAREER idea - make nanoswimmers viable for water treatment! As DMW said: "Today a lot of humanity is exposed to harmful contaminants like PFAS that currently goes untreated. The environmental and health costs are large. Such swimmers could destroy them in a wide variety of applications." That's the opening sentence of the proposal.

Pursue DNA nanoswimmers.

Pursue ViroBots. Maybe those should be made out of DNA nanoswimmers.

Pursue Shrishti's project. Maybe DNA NPs need to be Shrishti's project. I could float the idea. Let's see how our preliminary experiments go with the ibidi slides. But 'done' is better than 'perfect' in this case. Maybe we just go with loading and transport of cargo onto the rods and call it a day.

I take inspiration from two things:

• Lucky Adoh (a Twitter follower of mine from Nigeria): "Not all corns pop at the same time." I should remember this when comparing myself to various other assistant professors...
• Remembering the phrase from the episode of Louie: "Say 'I don't know' and you will learn everything." Sooner or later, if I'm going to get somewhere with some of this stuff, I need to admit my shortcomings and express a willingness to learn. Start from wherever I need to start, but always take a step forward.
• Bonus quote, from El Dragón: El regreso de un guerrero: "Don't do anything that is not useful."

OK, I need to get the eff to bed.