Last Friday was my last day as a postdoc in the Couzin Lab at Princeton University. I had a lot of fun there, I learned a lot too and I am so thankful of all the people (Iain in particular) who helped me reached the next level of my academic career. I am now starting as assistant-professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in the Federated Department of Biology (federated with Rutgers University). Starting my own lab is extremely exciting and I am looking forward to start equipping it and filling it with all sort of crawling and swarming creatures.
New lab, new name. I hesitated a lot on the name I wanted to give to the lab. Lab names are nothing official of course, but they are useful ways to group all the people working there under one label. Garnier Lab was the obvious first choice, but it did not sound good and it was too close to the name of a famous beauty product manufacturer. I tried Garnier Group, Garnier Swarm, etc., they did not work well either. I finally decided for Swarm Lab. It sounded good, it was directly related to the main center of interest of the lab and it represented well what I envision the lab to be in the future: busy as a bee hive or an ant nest.
New lab, new website too. I have revamped the general design of my old personal website and reserved the domain name theswarmlab.com. From now on, people who will connect to my personal website at simongarnier.com will be automatically redirected to theswarmlab.com. I imported most of the material from my old website, but I still have to write new material for the new sections that were not present on the old website or where highly modified from it. I also took down Swarm References for some time and I will bring it back after having reworked it.
Some important announcements will come very soon as I will start a search for a postdoc in the next 2-3 weeks for a start next January. Also I need to write a couple things about papers recently published or close to publication. Stay tuned!
