My New Year Resolutions:

1. Publish more papers..
   I say this every year..
2. Get more grants..
   Looks like it will be harder than ever before due to the global financial crisis and reductions in University funding in the UK. Students, don’t become academics! The life is hard and fraught with danger.. Mostly, early death due to stress.
3. Don’t lose any students..
   That’s right, I don’t want to lose any students out in the field or in my lectures.. I have a 100% retention rate at the moment!
4. Win the lottery and finance my own research..
   To achieve this I have to actually play the lottery.. Yeah right, my Dad says you have more chance getting your money back by throwing it into the street.

Adios folks..

NIOZ

Today we join the newly refurbished R/V Pelagia for a research cruise to investigate coral habitats off the United States continental shelf. This programme is being run by my colleague Dr Furu Mienis who has recently moved to MARUM in Germany, and involves scientists from UNC-W, MCBI, NIOZ, Heriot-Watt, Aarhus University and of course, Bangor.

This cruise follows the joint European-USA programme that we participated in in 2008, Dr Gerard Duineveld and Dr Furu Mienis left their landers ALBEX and BOBO down last year, so our primary aim is to recover the landers, deploy a third one baited for fish observations, do our usual CTD/mooring operations and take samples for biodiversity/genetics analysis.

More on this later…