Kris

I grew up in Coquitlam/Burnaby and graduated from Centennial Secondary in 1994. I am currently living in Vancouver (CANADA not Washington State) with my wife Betty. We have a cat named "Cobra Commander" - he protects our belongings with an iron claw.I enjoy traveling, history (ancient, military), politics, science, reading, camping, and drinking alcohol. I like football (CFLNFL) and hockey. I mean watching them, because I'm too busy to play anything! My brother will tell you he's the athletic one - but I'll kick his ass if he says that (hear that, Luke?)...Career: I'm a PhD student at UBC, in the Genetics program, working in the Michael Smith Laboratories in the Xin Li lab. I have my MSc. [2002] and BSc. (1st Hon.) [1999] from SFU. I spent 1 year of my Masters at UC Berkeley. Currently, I am finishing the 4th year of my PhD program, and am planning to defend and get my doctorate in early 2007. I am currently working on innate immunity/resistance signaling in plants, using a molecular genetics approach in Arabidopsis thaliana. I'll post more about that stuff later. Currently, I am working on two mutants, MOS6 and MOS4. The MOS6 story was published in Current Biology last year - the MOS4 project is growing into a rather large project, and I am currently preparing a manuscript on it. My research now is almost exclusively focused on the MOS4 complex and it's biochemical interactions... and just to let you know, these genes are found in humans too! I plan to do my PostDoc somewhere in Europe, hopefully. Then, return here and remain in academia with my own research program (wishful thinking??)...But besides that boring stuff, really I'm just a regular guy who wants to succeed, see the world, have a family, and get drunk a lot.