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!