hello again gopher - i keep not setting time aside to write on
here. some life updates: 
    - i've committed to a lab in my phd program. i'm being
      co-advised which is awesome. it'll be sort of touching a bit
      of everything. one side is immunology/signaling/systems
      modeling/transcription and the other is machine
      learning/structural/algorithmic etc. etc. it should be good i
      think.
    - i've been taking an art class with one of my favorite
      undergrad professors to keep myself sane. it's a generative
      AI class which i was hoping would be more than just using
      pre-trained image-generation models, but it's on me to do so.
      i'm excited for the course to progress more because it'll get
      more free-form constraint-wise.
i guess that's not too many life updates.

i've been working on the same project i started during my rotation,
where we're quantifying cell signaling as a function of cytokine
affinity to receptor. i'm doing all the structural stuff, which
currently just means running a bunch of MD simulations to try to
predict the change in change in free energy of these different
cytokines (which come from different animals) binding to the human
receptor in a cancer cell.