An introduction

During the interview weekend at Yale University, all the students and participating faculty ate dinner at the extremely fancy Graduate Club. Dr. David Schatz, a professor in the Immunology Department, made the following “rule” for dinner: “No faculty member was allowed to sit next to another faculty member. Each must satisfy both their left and right binding sites, and binding affinity will be measured by the end of the night.” Everyone burst out laughing. And I felt completely at home.

For those of you unfamiliar with biochemistry, Kd (the "d" is actually a subscript) measures binding affinity, or how well something fits into something else (for example, an oxygen molecule to the iron within hemoglobin, or an antigen to an antibody). As I am looking for that perfect fit as far as graduate school and life goes, Kd seemed an apt subject for a blog title. So…here goes!