The Paredez lab got a website for Christmas.  I put up a few retrospective posts and will do my best to keep things current.
-Alex  

Since it took me two years to get around to building a website, I don't have time to go back and make all the announcements I would have.  So here are some Highlights in reverse chronological order:

3/31/2014 Melissa is awarded a prestigous NSF GRFP fellowship
Spring 2014 Grad student Melissa Steele-Ogus joins the lab
9/1/2013 We are awarded a Royalty Research award to support the bumped kinase project.
4/5/2014 Our first paper "Identification of Obscure yet Conserved Actin-Associated Proteins in Giardia lamblia" is accepted!
6/13/13 Postdoc Jana Krtková arrives from the Czech Republic
5/1/13 Technician Jennifer Xu leaves for med school- she will be missed
Spring 2013:Grad students Kelly Hennessey and  Bill Hardin join the lab!
10/17/12 Technician Jennifer Xu arrives to help get the lab setup

The microscope was the first thing I ordered but there has been several delays getting it installed.  We ordered the scope with a new sCMOS camera that has some major advantages over the CCD camera they are loaning us (4x the field of view and  100FPS full chip).  The current hardware can't keep up with all the data so  Applied Precision is supposed to upgrade our system once they work out a new hardware configuration that will use RAID arrays and SSDs to keep up with the camera.  Still this scope is amazing compared to the 10 year old version I was using at UC Berkeley.

I got to UW at the beginning of September.  Renovations were behind schedule so I didn't get into my lab until late September. This wasn't really an issue since I spent the first month ordering equipment.  Most of the lab is now setup, the running our first PCR and agarose gel feels like an accomplishment.