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+++ title = "About me." author = ["Zachary Billman"] date = 2022-04-03 draft = false weight = 1 +++
Welcome to my site!
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. {{% sidenote %}} 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. {{% /sidenote %}} This makes for very interesting basketball viewing parties with my Duke friends!
My research and scientific interests.
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. 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.
Hobbies I may write about.
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. {{% sidenote %}} 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. Now that I have mangled together some CSS to get my precious sidenotes up and running again, I'm ready to begin putting some ideas to paper. {{% sidenote %}} I love marginalia. I'm not sure if this is unique to me, but I seem to get caught up in parenthetical / tangential thoughts very often, and I think using an Edward Tufte-esque sidenote is a great way for me to communicate in this way without distracting the reader too much. It seems marginalia such as this have been used throughout history, so perhaps it is normal, but most people can keep their thoughts focused better than me. The implementation I use is inspired by the Tufte CSS project and largely taken from this incredibly helpful post found at scripter.co. {{% /sidenote %}} I'm quite proud of my progress in administering my server and self-hosting useful services.
The future of this site.
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.