My wife and I moved to Hamilton, MT where that lab is located after searching around for the best mountain town to work remotely from.
It's a unique little town with amazing local mountains and rivers, some good restaurants and breweries and not too many tourists. The lab brings in educated young people including many climbers and skiers.
People joke that they government will let you live somewhere this awesome if you're willing to work on ebola.
In reality the lab was founded originally to study a tick born illness first observed in the area in the early 1900's and was eventually chosen as a BSL-4 site do in part to its isolated location and the fact that all access to the valley can be cut off by blocking a relatively few number of roads.
What are your days like? Sounds like an amazing job, and Montana is beautiful. Would you stay there, or do you plan to move back to somewhere busier later in life?
Honestly not much changed work wise except that instead of commuting i can go for a trail run or quick ski tour or head to the local bouldering area. I was already on a distributed team with most meetings done via video call and heavy use of issue trackers and chat for communication.
I lived in a big city for 10+ years and can't see going back. I've actually changed jobs once since we moved here and we plan to stay.
To be clear I don't work for RML. I just live here and work remotely for another company (originally for another bio research institution but that just confuses things.)
I suspect RML is one of the oldest and also one of the most active in areas like ebola research. Many of the newer ones seem to be focused on emerging diseases and bioterrorism and less on the existing really nasty diseases.
It's a unique little town with amazing local mountains and rivers, some good restaurants and breweries and not too many tourists. The lab brings in educated young people including many climbers and skiers.
People joke that they government will let you live somewhere this awesome if you're willing to work on ebola.
In reality the lab was founded originally to study a tick born illness first observed in the area in the early 1900's and was eventually chosen as a BSL-4 site do in part to its isolated location and the fact that all access to the valley can be cut off by blocking a relatively few number of roads.