April 8, 2014

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The Doctor Is In

I’ve been pretty quiet in this space for the last several months. In the 6 months since we started Food Matters, I’ve been absent for three of them.

By Kevin Bonham

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I've been pretty quiet in this space for the last several months. In the 6 months since we started Food Matters, I've been absent for three of them. I'm sorry about that, but I had a good reason, I swear... I published a paper, wrote my thesis, and yesterday I successfully defended my dissertation, and have now officially completed my PhD!

Next month, I start a new gig - I'll be teaching immunology in a new masters program here at Harvard. I'll be a curriculum fellow, which means that in addition to my teaching duties, I get to set aside time for continuing to do research. I'll be joining the lab of Rachel Dutton, a microbiologist that studies the complex interactions of the microbial communities that grow on cheese rinds. My training as an immunologist has meant that my lab life and topics for this blog had a fairly narrow overlap, but I'm confident that the things I learn for the new lab will almost all be perfectly suited to a food science blog.

With that in mind, I hope to ramp up my writing here at Food Matters, and to expand my online presence in a number of other areas. I have a few exciting projects in the works, so if you're interested in immunology, allergies, fermentation, microbes, infectious disease, beer and many related topics, follow me on google plus or twitter and I'll keep you posted.

Kevin Bonham is a Curriculum Fellow in the Microbiology and Immunobiology department at Harvard Medical school. He received his PhD from Harvard, where he studied how the cells of the immune system detect the presence of infectious microbes. Find him on Google+, Reddit.

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