Congratulations to a colleague and very close friend

with Shawn and Bernd,
originally uploaded by leongtuckwah.

Tuck submitted his PhD thesis last Monday and received his balloon at the School of Graduate Studies (If you see someone with such a balloon on campus, you can assume this person has just handed in his or her thesis - or it's open day at Melbourne Uni ;) His supervisors, Shawn and I were fortunate to be with him at this big moment.

Tuck has worked extremely hard over the last few years and created a more than outstanding piece of research. His supervisors highly praise his work and I'm sure it will be the thesis against which all other theses in the near future will be compared with (including mine :-O ) Tuck has also managed to get a post-doc position at an outstanding university in Europe, and that during times where funding and jobs are generally short.
He will leave us soon and Shawn and I will miss the conversations with him over a cup of coffee about research, life and everything else.

All the best Tuck!! ... and time for me to get some work done ;)

From Sheffield to Salzburg to Auersbach and back to Melbourne

Eureka Tower,
originally uploaded by bernd ploderer.

I travelled quite a bit over the last few weeks: First I left Sheffield after 3 great months and said "see you" to Nicola, Silvia, Coilin, Grace, Andy and Peter.
Wolfgang picked me up at the airport in Salzburg and I had a few fantastic days with him Laura, Sophie. It was great to catch up with Elisabeth, Regina, Michi, Carina, Geraldine, Berni, Christoph & Sigrun.
On the way to Auersbach I stopped in Graz to hang out with Lena on the Mur beach.
I spent my last week in Austria then in Auersbach with my family, relatives and friends Mario, Arnold, Christoph (playing volleyball felt sooooo good :), Lorenz, Jürgen & Phil. Time was way too short, and it wasn't fun to say "goodbye" again.
After more than 28 hours on planes and at airports I arrived in Melbourne where I was happy to see Lisa again. All the travels were fantastic, but I'm more than happy to settle down for a bit and to change trains and planes with my bicycle.