When the pandemic hit, remote work became the new normal for a while. An avid hiker and lover of tacos, I decided to go work remotely from the beautiful highlands of central Mexico. One of the things I did while working remotely was to spearhead a project studying the effects of vaccine hoarding on the evolution of new and more virulent variants of COVID, an international collaboration that included two professors and a grad student at local universities. This work was published as a chapter in a book on lessons learned from COVID (Elsevier).

As COVID restrictions began to loosen, I started to hang out at the Hidalgo State University during the day to meet other academics and recover from cabin fever. Before long, I found myself teaching a course in Mathematical Evolutionary Genetics (my specialty) and collaborating with faculty and grad students in the Math department on some very cool projects. In one of these projects, we figured out a way to estimate the rate at which cancer precursor cells are produced in our bodies. This work was published in the journal Axioms, with a student of mine as first author! It caught the attention of the cancer center at Arizona State, and my student presented it there and at the 2023 international Evolution meeting.

In sum, I was having lots of very productive fun. Eventually, however, funding for my remote work dried up and life took a turn for the worse. The nerd in me had forgotten that I also need to eat and keep a roof over my head. My Mexican colleagues (two professors in particular) were unbelievably kind to me and were paying me out of pocket to keep me off the streets. When the semester ended, they bought me a ticket out-of-pocket to head back to the states.

In more ways than one, it turned out to be a great time to head back and hang with my parents for a while, my dad needing major surgery and my mom needing help with it all. It has been a real blessing being with my folks, but now I need to get back to Mexico, as classes are in session and two of my math grad students are nearing defense of their theses!

My colleagues and I have several irons in the fire in terms of grant proposals and jumping through bureaucratic hoops to get me on a new payroll. In the mean time, however, my students need me, so I need to get back down to Mexico. And I'll probably have to survive for 2 or 3 months while waiting for the bureaucratic wheels to turn.

So there, that's what we need help with. Unless instructed otherwise, we will prominently acknowledge anybody who helps us out in our forthcoming scientific publications.

I'm asking for a total of $7,000, $2,000 of which will go to a grad student of mine whose scholarship has come to an end but still hasn't graduated thanks in part to my turmoil. Her thesis defense is scheduled for December and in the mean time we'll be wrapping up her very cool project that will make a major contribution to conservation biology among other things.

Thank you!! Gracias!!

A point-by-point work plan will be uploaded in the coming days as I meet and discuss it with my students.

Here is an example of some recently published work with direct application to cancer research ...