About Me

Me, painted in floral notes.

I'm Darren Abbey. Thanks to the Genetics PhD I picked up, my professional title is Dr. Abbey. I rarely get to pull that out though, so Darren is usually good.

I live in the United States, but have moved around a lot over the years. I was born in Illinois. My family moved to Alaska when I was four, then to Texas when I was seven. After undergrad I moved to Minnesota. I worked there for about six years as a lab tech, then went to grad school. Now I'm back to working in industry, as a "Clinical Certifying Scientist". There I work with a lot of human drug metabolism data and write software to streamline the work we do.

I still do sciencey stuff on the side. I've contributed to a few academic papers, reviewed a few, and some ongoing academic software development. I'm also active with the local DIYbio group (The website is kinda out of date, but folks routinely gather for the Wednesday evening open lab night. (Come on by!)). I spend a lot of time thinking about or working on plant breeding projects in my gardens. If the weather is good, I'll sometimes be out working on my woodland restoration project or on some carpentry project.

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I started this blog as an outlet for getting further writing experience that didn't come paired with all the stress of academic/professional writing duties. Biology was clearly my initial focus and posts have generally fallen into one of the following categories.

• Research I've read.
• Observations I've made.
• Personal/non-work experiments I'm doing.
• Topics I find interesting to think about, even outside biology.
• Topics I find important to think about.
• Plants (or animals, etc.) I find interesting.

As a rule, I won't discuss what I'm doing at my day job here. Anything I do write here should not be taken to represent the opinions of [my employer] and I don't want their legal department to get on my case about it.

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The blog also provides an outlet for my desire to use some of the photos I take. Sometimes I'll use photos from other sites (with source attribution) or construct figures in part from other sources (also with attribution) to illustrate something I'm discussing.
My writing frequency tends to come and go as I find the interest or motivation to write, and as I push through any writer's block I've been feeling. Once I've written posts, I schedule them for once a week. If I'm on a solid writing spree, I may put over a month of posts into the queue in a short time.

I'd rather avoid politically charged issues here, but sometimes that won't be possible. People get very charged up about some issues in biology, as the topics sometimes intersect with religious perspectives or medical care, while completely ignoring other issues.

The blog should be an honest representation of the sort of things I think about. I am a biologist, so most of the topics will relate, at least peripherally, to biology. I have other interests and they will appear from time to time. I expect that I will occasionally write about personal issues or experiences.

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I've thought about including posts by guest writers, but haven't made any specific plans towards that end. I'll make it very clear what is going on if I do end up going this route.

I've been thinking about setting up a Patreon, or a little online shop to hawk some merchandise, but those are still only the vaguest of concepts yet.

If you have a question about biology or me, feel free to ask. You can comment after each post, or find me over on Twitter and/or Instagram.

Follow me on Twitter: @thebiologistisn

Follow me on Instagram: thebiologistisn