Week in Review: 27th July

It's been a productive week, despite the school holidays meaning I was only in three days. This week, we managed to get an NIHR proposal submitted, a forthcoming EPSRC proposal reviewed and off my desk (I'm a co-Investigator in both cases, so I can't take all the credit, but I've put a good few hours in in each!), I've had a very exciting meeting with Khemeia consulting about commercialising some of my work (details are confidential but it's all exciting).

The main achievement though, has been writing LabVIEW code to automatically process kinematic data from 1620 optotrak files of reach-to-grasp movements. The aim is to see if the model Mark Mon-Williams and I have come up with for pre-contact movements is supported by the data. I've got all working, I'm pleased to say: next week, I just need to identify suitable initial parameters for curve-fitting, and I should be able to test our hypothesis... I'm excited!

And on a side note, today was my last day as Programme Manager for Product Design, after eight years in the role. Not that it meant much in practice: Having been ill for most of the last three months, I've been de facto out of the role since April, and of course, by July, virtually all the admin work is under the bridge. Still, it's been a big part of my job for the last eight years  (80% of my time as an academic, nearly a quarter of my life and fully two thirds of the time the course has existed!), so I thought I'd write up a proper post reflecting on my time. It's a  lot longer than these updates, so it takes longer to write, but keep your eyes peeled for it next week!

Week in Review: 20th of July

Updating a little earlier than normal this week, since School Summer Holidays mean that I'm off on childcare tomorrow!

Anyway, it's been a fairly steady week this week: I've had to slow down my return, and fight the temptation to do extra hours. After overdoing it last week, and then being hardly able to walk on Saturday, I realised that I really, really had to dial it back. So rather than upping the hours, I've stuck to half days this week, and I must say that I feel better this afternoon than I did last Thursday, so things are still going in the right direction. I've just got to pace myself, is all.

Of course, I've now turned a corner away from risk assessments, HR meetings and drawing up work plans to actually getting things done, which is a great feeling. Mostly, this week has been given over to reviewing two proposals that are due to go in this summer - not the Fellowship (though that will be coming back onto my desk next week, when these two go off), but an EPSRC grant on haptic support, and a last-minute NIHR bid on Heart Rate Monitoring. I'm not PI on either, but the time has come for me to add my tuppence worth as a co-investigator, and assess kit and research designs, costings, etc. All good stuff.

One thing I've really enjoyed is that we've been taking a more strategic approach to PACLab over the summer. We've developed a technology roadmap laying out the technologies and models we need to develop over the next few months and years to underpin our grant and paper writing (particularly in preparation for REF2020), drawn up a list of priorities, assigned them to people and we've started using the weekly PACLab slot to review progress. It's a great system, and it's good to have a regular point to touch base and see what progress is going on, rather than just beavering away in your office and relying on the odd email to catch up with people.

Also, I've just received a big load of data from Mark Mon-Williams to run through some of our grip models. It's really exciting stuff, and I had to resist the temptation to put in a little extra time to comb through it all now - especially since Monday seems a long time away. Likewise, more parts have arrived for FATKAT 2.0, and the temptation to start building is enormous - but I've learned my lesson from last week, and made sure to power down my PC on time, and take a break til Monday. So I'm signing off for now - stay tuned!

Week in Review: 13th July

It's been a busy week. In good ways, generally: attending a workshop for Leeds Institute of Data Analytics; a constructive meeting with HR and my line manager to review my return to work  (key takeaway: to slow down my return); PACLab; a meeting of the PACLab core team to agree summer priorities; a meeting with Anne-Marie Moore (Together Through Play researcher) and Angharad Beckett for the first time since Anne-Marie's viva; a meeting with our Director of Research to get feedback on my Fellowship; a meeting to discuss a forthcoming EPSRC bid on rehab robotics on which I'm co-I; a meeting with my summer intern student to discuss his progress with FATKAT (in a nutshell: good, and starting to break ground on actual data processing); and a meeting with Bryan Matthews from transport studies to discuss another potential research bid on accessible transport, and the focus groups to underpin it.

These are all good and productive things: this is the "end of the beginning" of my return to work, moving from planning and prioritising and just remembering what work is like to actually doing things. But there's no question I overdid it this week: that's 12 hours of meetings in a week where I'm meant to be doing 18 hours' work. Despite my best intentions, I ended up doing 20 hours, and I'm really feeling it!

I'll definitely have to watch out for that next week.

On the plus side things are coming together - but I can see I'll need to be more careful about pacing myself in future, rather than getting overexcited about being back. Still, at least there're things to get excited about, eh?

Week in Review: 6th July

Hmmm... I need to come up with some snazzier headings for these week in review posts. But not yet. Right now, I'm just pleased to have a working week to review.

So, I've survived my second week of phased return (now up to a whopping three hours a day!) and it has to be said: it's tougher than I had expected. On Monday afternoon, I was feeling quite pleased that I'd managed three hours work without feeling as shattered as I did after an hour and a half on Friday: I was obviously getting back into the swing of things! By Wednesday, dragging my exhausted limbs home, I had changed my tune. Still, here we are on Friday, and I've managed to do my allotted work - I'm happy to tick off as an achievement. I got in every day, I did my work - and that's more work than I've done in the previous 11 weeks. Of course, I won't be able to play that card again next week, so I'll make the most of it while I can!

And writing down what you've managed of a week is a good discipline - you often find out it's more than you thought. If nothing else, this episode has been a salutary reminder that just turning up and working is an achievement, and not to be taken for granted. Anyway - apart from that, I've managed to get another draft of my Fellowship application finished. That was hard work. Getting started was awful: I really had the sense of rusty gears grinding together as I tried to get my head around how to write again. By Wednesday afternoon, I was feeling quite down about it - but actually, things unjammed a bit on Thursday, and today I got it polished off and sent to others to take a look at, so that's big one off the To Do list. Also, I had a very productive meeting with Sarah Astill, Will Shaw and Romulo de Souza Martins (a student who will be studying with us over the summer as part of his Science without Borders Scholarship). It was good to be talking FATKAT again - and digging into metrics and feature recognition, and make some key decisions about what parameters we prioritise. Good stuff.

I'm back!

Well, that was unexpected! As the tone of my last post might indicate, when I said "maybe next week?" I hadn't anticipated that my next post would be over two months later.  I've just about got used to the idea that it isn't April any more, but it's taken some doing.

Anyway, I'm back, I'm better - and for the first time in two and a half months, I've just finished a week's work. I'm on a phased return, which has meant doing just over two hours a day this week, and gradually working up from there. Occupational Health had warned me it would be tiring, and I must say - they were absolutely right. Still, it's good to be back, and over the course of this week, coming in has gradually moved back to feeling normal. It's been a slow week - mostly dedicated to planning and time management. Risk-assessing my return, working through an email back log (and if I haven't got back to you yet - don't worry - I will!), and identifying what tasks I'm prioritising. So you'll have to take this as this week's "weekly update" - I got back, I started to get organised, and I turned up for work every day. Right now, that feels like an achievement in itself!

By the by, this week also heralded the second anniversary of this Blog! I was tempted to do a review of the last year, and a look forward to the next - but to be honest, it'll have to wait. I'm off to have a much-needed rest (and well-earned, if I say so myself). Next week, I'll hopefully have something more substantive to update you on!