a recently-published paper by one of my former students

One of my former students, former Georgia Tech undergraduate (and now alum) Jessica Snyder is the coauthor of a recently published paper in the journal Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering. (The appear, about the role of vaccination in modeling the dynamics of SARS, appears in the October 2005 issue of this journal.) You can register online for free if you want to take a look at the article. My purpose here is to brag on behalf of my student. :)

In her work with me, Jessica studied a toy nonlinear oscillator model for bipolar disorder. Our paper, which also includes a few other authors, is presently under review. Those of us who served as advisors on the project have been sitting on it for a while. Essentially, what we did is in very early stages and the purpose of our paper is to hopefully help simulate some ideas with this perspective, and to be honest it's not clear we'll be able to address what the referees want for this particular paper. (One referee indicates that he/she thinks this perspective won't be useful without more experiments to allow it to be more quantitative, but it's not clear that such experiments will be done unless there's some sort of toy model paper out there to discuss some of the ideas, so it's a chicken-and-egg thing going on.) Eventually, we'll stop sitting on this paper and work on and submit a revised version but with my applying for jobs last year and then changing institutions and the other person who acted as an advisor needing to finish up a book (and having a position at a university with a 3-3 teaching load, meaning 3 courses per semester), we've just been letting the referee reports sit on our desks for a while.