Doctor Dale

He did it! Dale successfully defended his dissertation on Wednesday. The room was packed - lots of his coworkers came. He spoke eloquently for about an hour. (I learned a lot! And quite a bit of it was over my biologically uneducated head, but I think that's as it should be.) Then there were a few minutes of questions, and a break, and then the private "grilling" by his committee. In my department, that part lasts maybe twenty minutes and then there is a party where all your friends and coworkers toast your success. So I made an extremely decadent cake (no pictures, argh! but it was this one) and brought champagne and set it all up in the room next door to his defense, expecting that he and his coworkers and committee could all have a little par-tay. Then we found out that the Q&A was expected to last ninety minutes. Uh. His coworkers all left, and eventually I had to leave too, to pick up the kids! How unfair is that! But eventually Dale was released (he said the questioning was not at all unpleasant, just a long scientific conversation) and he and his committee had the cake and champagne together. Phew. And later Dale and I went on a lovely date at Zaytinya, a place I had always meant to take him, so I got a little party too.

For your information, his dissertation research is about autophagosomes, the "housekeeping" structures inside our cells that clean up and recycle damaged parts. If the housekeeping isn't done properly, certain cancers and neurodegenerative diseases can result. His main claim is about how autophagosomes form: They come from the mitochondria. It's important to know the details, since people are trying to treat diseases by increasing the quantity of housekeeping. Dale's claim is apparently quite remarkable: one of the faculty members who attended Dale's defense said before that he'd be astonished if it was actually true. But at the end, that guy said he thought Dale had the data. The picture at left is part of that data.

The committee wants a few miniscule revisions before they sign off; it'll be done before we leave. This is fantastic news... they could have asked for additional experiments, additional chapters, anything they wanted. Whew!

The next day Dale's coworkers drank the other bottle of champagne and made him wear this crazy hat that they made for him. It is adorned with the Washington Monument, the Space Needle, silly pictures of Dale as Super BioMan, Pop-Tarts (a treat Dale is known for at work), and varieties of zebrafish, among other things. Apparently hats like this are a German tradition. Dale would like it known that he can't actually look up with this ginormous thing on his head, hence his funny expression in the photos.