Congratulations to Dr. Joseph Schaeffer!

It is once again my pleasure to announce the successful thesis defense of one of my good friends. Welcome to the club, Dr. Joe Schaeffer, who unsurprisingly had a very smooth defense of his thesis (which is in the broad area of computational biology)! I'm not putting in more details on the topic just because I'll probably get tons of things wrong if I do, and I would be relying mostly on his paper in SIAM Review that predates tons of stuff in the thesis.

My congratulations might have worked better if I didn't have a bit of a screw up with Joe's phone number, but that is a rather small glitch in the scheme of things.

Update (9/29/12): I'm not sure how I managed to forget to write this, but Joe's PhD is from Caltech and his supervisor is Erik Winfree. So those of you who want to find out more about the work in that lab now have a place to look. :)