My name is Zachary Billman. I'm an MD-PhD student at UNC Chapel Hill in Ed Miao's lab. The curious reader may be thinking: "But Zach, Ed Miao's lab is at Duke now! What does that make you?" What an astute question! I am a card-carrying UNC Microbiology and Immunology student who happens to have all of their research take place at Duke.
This move was quite a trial, especially when compounded with the onset of the pandemic. I suspect my research timeline suffered, though this is an extremely minor inconvenience compared to the tragedy the pandemic caused.
I am broadly interested in innate immunology. I am in the 4th year of my PhD studying the host-pathogen interaction between the intracellular fungus _Histoplasma capsulatum_ and macrophages.
This is a test marginnote. If this worked you will see a copy of my headshot. I'm not sure how large this image will appear, I hope it's reasonably sized.
{{% /marginnote %}} There are many unstudied curiosities regarding the innate immune response to _Histoplasma spp._ and other intracellular fungi that I think are quite interesting. Stay tuned, hopefully there is a major breakthrough to report here someday.
Besides my science, I am interested in birding, baking sourdough bread (I swear I began years before the pandemic, though hearing of people baking bread brings me joy no matter when they first began!), board games, roasting coffee, and self-hosting free and open source software. Over the course of the pandemic, I have learned how to maintain a basic suite of services on a server I rent that have replaced my need for Google Photos and Google Drive.
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I'm hoping to be able to move away from these platforms entirely soon. I think they provide a great service, but at a substantial cost to privacy. Hopefully more to be said about my thoughts on FOSS soon!
{{% /sidenote %}} I also transitioned my old, (and quite frankly, embarassingly slow) managed Wordpress site with this lean, static site made in Hugo that I host myself. I'm quite proud of my progress in this regard.
## The future of this site. {#the-future-of-this-site-dot}
On this site I plan to post updates about my journey through med school, grad school, and self-hosting I would like to share with the world. I have been helped immensely by many others' advice and I hope to impart similar tips to others someday. I suspect most posts will be about much lighter fare, like whatever hobbies tickle my fancy at the time.
