On mentoring: reflections on an empty nest

My first employee has left the lab. It was planned and expected. She pledged to work with me and
move from Boston to DC to help set up the lab. I pledged to do my best to get her into a wonderful graduate program, preferably in sunny California. We both held up our ends of the bargain.

She leaves for an exciting adventure and I stay to watch the lab change and move on. This is new for me. As a student and postdoc you see people leave and you imagine your own departure. As a professor you stay and worry a bit how the dynamics will change, especially if an important person in the culture you have created is gone. You worry about experiments getting done, about transitioning new people. At the same time you are happy and proud to send your mentee into the world.

I wonder whether this feeling is a fraction of what parents feel when their children leave. While I do not advocate treating lab people like your children and in fact tend to prefer formal and professional behavior instead of the TMI environment of millenials, having had multiple mentors throughout my career I realized something that they don't really tell you in grad school. A good mentor is forever! They will cheer you and support you, they will write letters for decades after you have left their labs, they will promote your work and they will be there to discuss your doubts. I always tell students you need at least one mentor like that in your life or you will have a much harder time.

So I have not lost my tech, since there will still be work to do until she has to find a postdoc or the next job. The reward of mentoring and I guess the reason why we wanted to be in academic science in the first place is to see these young people move on to bigger and better things. But still it may take a while to get used to this.

Freezers and fridges for your lab

The pricing of research items does not make sense to me. When I tried to buy a drafting stool for a high bench from Overstock.com for $110, I was told that insurance only covers chairs bought from VWR or Fisher and had to spend $244 for a VWR High Bench chair, luckily deeply discounted from a list price of $674.

Snowflakes at the electron microscope

As the lab is growing we started to fill the hand-me-down freezers and fridges I had collected from other investigators, and I had to figure out what to do. I wanted a nice and spacious 2 door deli case fridge. I didn't need a fancy chromatography fridge such as the one listed from VWR for $9,695.69 (Symphony Chromatography Refrigerators), but even the basic 49 cu. ft. 2-door fridge was not much cheaper at $6,899. With a good quote, I could have probably knocked 2-3K off the list price, but even if my institution has restrictions on chairs, it does not have restrictions on vendors for appliances. So after multiple searches on Webstaurantstore.com and KaTom Restaurant Supply, in comes a great 45 cu. ft. 2-door beverage merchandiser from True Refrigeration for around $2,300. I paid an extra $400 for white glove delivery so that it wouldn't get stuck in the loading dock and our fridge space is now tripled. A neighbor has had the same fridge happily for 10 years...and even if it breaks in 5 years, it's still 1/3 of the scientific distributor's price. This is $3-5,000 in your equipment budget that now you can use for something else.


Same goes for small undercounter freezers and fridges. In my old institution every bench came with one undercounter for free I believe, but here I just need a couple for specific applications that require separate freezer space. Again the VWR 5 cu. ft. general purpose freezer is listed at $1,639. From Best Buy you can get a 4.2 cu. ft. upright freezer for less than $300.

Hope this helps.

Setting up your lab website

Your website is your labs' ambassador to the outside world. Prospective students and job applicants will check it out before applying, so will collaborators or potential donors. I have been talking to a lot of other new PIs discussing website options and set up my site right when I opened the lab. In our hyper-connected world not having a website is almost like being invisible.

I made some choices, which may not necessarily be the best ones, but I thought I'd share the process.

Independent vs. institutional. In some cases this may not be a choice at all. Some school will be very protective of their brand and will not allow their logo to be used in your personal lab website. In this situation, they may offer to host your site, but you will have very limited personalization options and will end up with a site which will look like your institution's site. As scientists we tend to want to express our individuality and to attract the best applicants, we also want to project the lab personality on the site. Is your brand distinct from the one of your institution? How much are you willing to pay for your brand?

Homemade vs. pre-made vs. custom designed. The choice on the design of your independent site will come down to 1) how good you are with HTML and 2) how much you care or want to spend. If you or a student of yours are good a web design, you can make your site whatever you want, but have to take the time to generate the look. If you are willing to spend some money to use a hosting service with pre-designed templates, you can pick something you like and populate the template much faster. Then, there is always the option of having a professional get a personalized template ready for you to populate.

Fancy vs. simple. The choice of which design to use is not an easy one. In general my feeling is that lab websites have to be relatively simple without crazy graphics and busy columns, but a site with more bells and whistles may be more attractive to a younger audience. At the end your site must reflect the image of the lab.

A word about hosting. There are many different hosting options that could be available to you. If your university does not care about branding, they may be willing to host your personal lab site for you with your design. If you want to have an outside provider and what to have a pre-designed site there are multiple hosting sites ranging from $0.50 to $5 a month for basic service. It's not easy to determine which hosting service would work best and at the end it may just come down to cost, template availability and ease of update. Some comparisons can be found here and here. I am using iPage, which as far as I can tell has been very good, templates are good looking and customizable and updates are very easy. The structure of the pages could probably be more flexible, but it works well for a basic lab website.

Salary negotiations for K99 and R00 awardees

You now have you K99/R00 award from the NIH, but what are you going to do with it? April is negotiation time and I have been speaking with multiple friends dealing with job offers. Through the years I have collected information from multiple K99 recipients and gone through my own negotiations and learned a few things.

How much you get out of it depends on how much you can push your bosses. When negotiating I was advised to push as much as I could and back off only when you get the feeling that you have reached a limit. You must absolutely get what you need to do your work, but then there may still be things that you want which would make your life easier. So you must get what you need and keep trying to get what you want.

When you get your K99, if you are not already a Staff Scientist/Instructor, you should ask for a promotion which comes with a salary increase. As a PhD at this point you should be making between $60-80,000 depending on the salary structure at your institution. The decision may be yours in relation to how much you want to pay yourself. You may need more money if you have expensive child-care and a mortgage and should clearly state this to your boss or you may decide to funnel more money into the supply budget and keep your salary lower.

- No salary support from K99: I talked to someone who was able not to put any salary on the K99 portion because his boss agreed to support him and he could use all the money to pay for a technician and to buy small equipment and supplies. That is a huge chunk of money that you can use to offset your start-up.

- Partial salary support from K99: You must put at least 75% effort on your K99, but the rest of the salary can come from somewhere else. As I discovered, if you help your PI with an R01 and are listed as Key Personnel on it, you cannot be removed, so an additional portion of your salary can come from that.

Faculty salary negotiations always catch people unaware. We have no training whatsoever to negotiate for salary and in a lot of cases we do not even know how much an Assistant Professor is supposed to make. Depending on the institution and geographical location it is safe to say that a research university pays between $70,000 and $130,000. That is a huge spread and for a frame of reference for your specific institution you can use Glassdoor. As far as I know salary negotiation for myself and most of my friends went like this - Chair:"We are going to pay you $X" Interviewee: "Oh, OK. That sounds good." Whatever they offer may be fine for you, but your should make some calculations before to make sure you get what you need if you have tuition or a mortgage to pay. If you can justify a specific need, you should ask for what you want. And then you need to discuss how much you will put on your R00...

- No salary support from R00: For a long time I thought this was a white whale, something you really want and that keeps eluding you. I was intrigued by this wording in the K99/R00 Program Announcement "Institutions must provide a startup and salary package equivalent to that provided to a newly hired faculty member who does not have a grant; R00 funds may not be used to offset the typical startup package or to offset the usual institutional commitment to provide salary for tenure-track (or equivalent) assistant professors who are hired without grant support."  My assumption is that if other tenure-track assistant professors are hired with full salary support for the first three years, putting part of your salary on the R00 does offset your start-up package, but everyone I knew has partial salary on the R00. Until I found out that someone was able to negotiate no salary on the R00! This allows you to hire one or two extra people and can make all the difference in generating data during the first few years. It doesn't hurt to try.

- Partial salary support from R00: The R00 also requires 75% effort, but that doesn't mean that you have to put 75% of your salary on it. If you cannot get 0% salary, you should try and negotiate that as little as possible of your salary goes on your R00, so that you can use the money otherwise. It is going to be very difficult to change it afterwards. If you can get as low as 10% and get the department to cost share the rest, go for it (see comment below and cite this precedent). But in general, I've heard numbers around 40-50%. You have to particularly careful about your effort from now on as I discuss in a follow-up post.
Hope this is helpful. Please keep me posted on how your negotiations go, so that I can update.

"The New PI" turns ONE!!

I now have one year of being a PI under my belt. A year ago I was filled with anticipation,
somewhat naively embarking on this amazing adventure (here). Nobody can prepare you for it and nobody can tell you how hard it is going to be. At times it was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life (here), and I went from the happiest and productive I had ever been to feeling trapped in a bog just trying to figure out how to keep my head above water. I used the metaphor before of feeling like a steam engine trying to get a train full of lead to get going and a friend recently described starting a lab as attempting to move a mountain. You start by wondering how you are going to do it and feeling like an abject failure, but then you find a groove, a handhold and you start pulling...and things start to move, oh, so imperceptibly.
The last couple of days sum it up very nicely. March 30 I braved the rain and snow to get myself to lab after a week of 12-14 hour days doing experiments for revisions on one of my postdoc papers, trying to get a letter of intent for a grant written and dealing with the million random administrative things coming at me every day (getting my DEA license, ordering, harassing HR...). I was emotionally and physically exhausted, so when I got back home I just started trolling pharma web sites looking for another job. March 31 I was awarded my first independent grant, got reviews back for my first paper as a senior corresponding author requiring somewhat minimal additional work and got asked on a thesis committee (does this count as "service"?). Had yesterday not happened, this would have been a very different post. This job has a way to rope me back every time and so we move forward.

These are some of the things I learned in my first year:

1) It's going to be slow. Everyone tells you "It will take forever to get anything done". You listen to them, but have no concept of how slow things can really get. If you are used to continuous movement like I am, it is utterly excruciating. I really urge you to finish you postdoc papers before you start if you don't want to go insane. I also recommend a good yoga teacher or whatever makes you zen.

2) Find some buddies. Get coffee or drinks with the other new PIs in your department or your school. Vent, learn from each other's mistakes, lean on each other. It's easier when you have other people to strategize with and going through the same things. It's also fun when you can meet people from other departments working on completely different subjects. You can come up with crazy interdisciplinary groups and it reminds you why you wanted to be a university professor in the first place.

3) Manage up. Managing up is a skill I am still learning. I tend to get frustrated and not ask for what I need, when in reality I can often just ask my chair and he fixes the problem right away. A lot of the grief I put myself through is self-inflicted, when I could just get my superiors involved and work with them to make things better.

4) Remember why you are doing it. At the end of graduate school I made a pact with a friend that I would quit the moment this job stopped being fun. If it's not fun, it's not worth your time. I love the people in my lab. I think they're awesome and smart and funny, and it's great going to work with them every day. I love sitting on the confocal, taking beautiful pictures. It's peaceful and I can carve 3-4 hours of "me time" to play with lasers. I also love writing grants (not kidding). I love writing in general, but seeing a brand new idea you didn't even know you had shape up in front of your eyes and crafting it into a story are really enjoyable...and I get to buy a really expensive pair of shoes or a painting if I get the grant.

Picture credit: Trust me, I'm a "Biologist"

Awesome books about writing an NIH grant

I wanted to share a couple of books which list all the things I wish I knew before I applied for my first research grant from the National Institutes of Health: Research Proposals: A Guide to Success and How the NIH Can Help You Get Funded: An Insider's Guide to Grant Strategy. These books are perfectly complementary to each other providing an in depth description of the functioning of the NIH and of the review process and a thorough primer on how to write an R01 proposal. They both are available in the Kindle edition which is much cheaper than the paperback.

How the NIH Can Help You Get Funded. About the authors: Michelle Kienholz is a grant writer and consultant with extensive experience in helping scientists obtain NIH funding and Jeremy Berg is the former director of the NIGMS, one of the NIH Institutes. The foreword is written by former NIH Director, Elias Zerhouni, who says that this is the book to get if you want to understand the NIH.
About the book: This is the ultimate guide to the NIH, starting from a thorough description of the different institutes, their different philosophies and their paylines updated to 2012-2013. This book will tell you who the different grant management officials are (literally there are links to the name of all of them), what they do and how/when to interact with them appropriately. You will learn how a grant is reviewed and in addition you will receive great advice on how to structure your proposal so that it is understandable and effective. How the NIH Can Help You Get Funded is incredibly well written, easy to follow and a treasure trove of advice to help you be successful in your grant application by developing the best grant application strategy. I would highly recommend the Kindle edition since there are hundreds of links sprinkled throughout the book and in the Appendix to find all the information you may need online. $15.65 on Amazon for Kindle, $28.45 paperback

Research Proposals. About the authors: Thomas Ogden was a professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and Israel Goldberg is a grant writing consultant and president of Health Research Associates.
About the book: Though the last edition was published more than 10 years ago, this is still an excellent basic book on how to structure and write grant proposal for the NIH. The bulk of the book deals with R01 proposals and each chapter focuses with one portion of the grant giving you solid advice on what to stress and what to do to convince the reviewers. At the end there are a few smaller chapters on other types of applications such as training (K and T) grants, program projects (P01) and business grants. Some of the specific information is outdated and it can be easily found in "How the NIH" reviewed above, but the description of how to think about approaching an R01 and how to communicate your science is timeless. I have been using this book for a while and spent a lot of time chasing it around to get it back from people who borrowed it. $39.69 on Amazon for Kindle, $53.02 paperback (much cheaper if you buy used)

Another book I read recently is Storytelling for Grantseekers: A Guide to Creative Nonprofit Fundraising. I'm not sure I would recommend the book itself, since it focuses much more on helping small governmental and non-governmental organization shape their funding applications to foundations, so it is difficult to translate the approach for biomedical applications. I bought it because I was interested in using storytelling techniques to improve the flow and readability of my applications. After all an R01 can be easily turned into a three-act play and generating tension between a hero and an antagonist which is resolved at the end is a dramatic technique people respond to. I still need to figure out how to build it in...

Please let me know if you have found books you like.

I survived the RPPR....I think...

The NIH emailed me 2 months ago that my Progress Report was due on February 15 and so as busy little bee I started working on my progress report and got everything done until I found out that the Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR) is the new progress report format for NIH funded multi-year awards starting on January 31 (NOT-OD-14-026).
In reality, the RPPR is not enormously different from the previous progress report, but the organization is different and you have to put everything in the context of Goals instead of Specific Aims and of Accomplishments. You access everything from eRA Commons and click were RPPR appears next to your grant in the Status list....not on the RPPR tab, because nothing shows up if you click there.
Then you have to go through A. Cover, B. Accomplishments, C. Products, D. Participants, E. Impact, F. Changes, G. Special Reporting, and H. Budget

A. Cover - usual info on applicant, institution and signing officials
B. Accomplishments - most of the old progress report is now split in multiple sections: one for goals which I assumed was the specific aims as it is stated that they must be the goals of the application and should not change from one reporting period to the next, so I changed Specific Aim to Goal in the text. Then there is a 2 page summary of accomplishments, i.e. results (figures included), which is a PDF, then there is a summary of plans for the future. For the Goals and Plans they have a maximum of 8,000 characters, but would prefer 1 page which is around 3,000, so I tried to make them happy. Do yourself a favor and do not use special characters.
C. Products - papers, websites, etc. Mouse lines go under Other Products....
D. Participants - people
E. Impact - not applicable to R00. It refers to awards that have to have an institutional impact, maybe Ps or equipment grants?
F. Changes - self explanatory: changes in permissions, collaborators, etc
G. Special Reporting - not applicable to R00
H. Budget - pilot section from non-SNAP awards. Not applicable.

There are dozens of random things to click saying NOTHING TO REPORT. I just made an appointment with my grants management person and had him sit next to me as I was going through because apart from section B I didn't know what half the things meant. With him it took just ten minutes or so, plus reorganizing the whole thing and just getting familiarized with the new system. Why, why NIH not implement this at the end of February? If all goes well sequestration is done for good and I will have avoided sequestration completely. I managed to sneak through last year just before they started cutting.

Update 4/1/14: Grant was supposed to start today, but still no news on eRACommons. Despite having made good progress on the grant, I was worried that something might be going on. A quick email to my Grants Management person indicated that they got their budget late and everything was approved. Still waiting for a Notice of Award.

Learning how to hire #3: checking references is a networking tool

Back into the hunt for a postdoctoral fellow and I am back calling people all over the world to check
references. As stressful as it is to take half an hour off your busy schedule to talk to the prospective fellow's former supervisor, it is the best use of your time. I have already mentioned the importance of checking references (here and here), but I am always amazed at what I learn about the fellows, the institution they come from and their referees. The best part is how truly helpful and honest almost everyone is. I don't know whether it is because I am new at this and I clearly explain to them that I am looking for my first postdoc, but everyone has taken their time to understand what I want and to figure out whether the applicant is the right person. Sometimes he/she is not a good fit and they tell me very clearly, sometimes there are issues that are raised and discussed very honestly and sometimes they are really excited to talk about their best student. Everyone in a way identifies with me, because they have been there, looking for that first diamond in the rough, and they are ready to give advice.

This sense of community garnered from reference checking has somewhat surprised me. Maybe I should have expected it because judicious recommendations of students and postdocs are such a cornerstone of academic research, but the honesty and the time people have taken to talk things through has been amazing. What also surprised me are the professional relationships that have emerged. At some point I decided to give a little introduction of the lab and of the project when I first talk to someone, which also puts our work in prospective and sometimes I just end up talking science with this person I have never met. One of these referees I have then met in person at a conference to chat about possible collaborations, another invited me to give a talk, someone offered to post my ad in their department and keep an eye out for suitable candidates, someone will help me with the further career development of our now common mentee. All this was a great unexpected bonus, so that now I am really looking forward to checking references because I never know whom I could meet. 

How social media will change the way we publish science

Happy 2014 everyone!! A new year is starting, so I thought I would talk about trends and about how the world in changing....just my world really...In the past few years, I have had many conversations with friends, colleagues and mentors about the sorry state of scientific publishing. The dozens and dozens of new journals, the flood of articles in PubMed that support and invalidate every single hypothesis you can come up with, the ridiculous amount of time spent to replicate (or more often fail to replicate) published results about my favorite protein.

Everyone complains, editorials are written, the Economist tells us we are all liars (here), yet we have to publish to survive, i.e. get grants, get promoted, get invited to speak, and in general let the world know we are alive. More and more we are wondering where would it be more advantageous to go, debate minimum publishable units (MPUs) vs paradigm shifting tomes, hope that our newest submission will be mistakenly routed to our sweet old aunt at the early stages of dementia "Wonderful, dear! Your story was just wonderful!" Then we read trendy articles in fancy magazines and run into other people's offices crying "Did you see this? WHO? WHO REVIEWED THIS?!"

But things are a-changin' and it's kind of cool. Despite old stalwarts of tradition like Elsevier who do their absolute best to avoid sharing articles (here), first came the Public Library of Science (PLoS), then Frontiers In and e-Life. Then Randy Shenkman (also eLife's editor-in-chief) gets the Nobel Prize and launches a boycott of the "big three", Nature, Science and Cell (here...just read the article for the comments of the editors, they're priceless!). People are angry, they want better science, in a more public, reliable, shared environment...kind of like on Facebook, where you can like an excellent post, discuss an iffy one and boo a bad one. In comes the NIH with PubMed Commons, a new initiative where everyone who is an author indexed in PubMed can get an account and comment on any paper. Will it work? Will people do it? Your full name will be visible to all, so would you be the first one to poo poo a paper from someone really powerful? Would it be easier if someone famous does the critiquing first? It could potentially be very very cool as you could look up an abstract and find a series of comments discussing the believability of the results or the solidity of the hypotheses, but everyone will have to do it turning PubMed into Facebook for scientists. I wonder if by clicking on your name the other people could see whether you published on the same subject of the article you comment on...

I also wonder whether as everything else in our lives, we are going to start choosing our publishers based on conviction and corporate image, in addition to impact. And if we do, would our tenure committee understand? In the meantime, I have turned down an offer to review a paper for Elsevier and instead accepted one for Frontiers, where my name will be listed at the end if the paper is accepted. I always do my best as a reviewer, but this was a daunting prospect and it made me very invested in the quality of the manuscript. I still believe in the power of peer review and it is possible that in a world where everything is visible to everyone on social medias, people will become fine with sticking their necks out and vouching for their own reviews. The only problem will be to make sure that information is not filtered out only based on popularity, since some gems may be lost, but why not give this a try?

Developing your annual performance review criteria

It's that time of the year again!! As the year draws to a close it is time to get organized for annual performance reviews of your lab peeps. I started last year (here) and I think it was appreciated by all: it is always good to sit down and formally discuss how and where things are going. Your university may have specific performance review forms you have to follow for merit-based pay increases or promotions and those are very helpful to set up a framework for the meeting. But you can also just come up with your own criteria.

Two major questions for trainees (and research assistants expecting to go to graduate school) are:
- What are your career goals?
- When do you expect to transition to the new step of your career?

Since are individuals whose salary is funded on NIH grants will need to have an IDP (individual development plan), you might as well do it for everyone and the annual performance meeting is the perfect occasion to restructure your employees' IDP and revise/develop goals.

These are some questions to ask yourself, in particular about the junior people in the lab (techs/students):
- Is a good experimentalist? Accurate? Understands how to handle reagents? Follows protocols? Asks appropriate questions as needed?
- Understands the different steps of each protocol so that pauses are only taken at the appropriate times and troubleshooting can be done as needed?
- Understands the appropriate negative/positive controls?
- Analyzes and interprets data?
- Understands the implications of the data into the larger project? Asks appropriate questions?
- Reads and understands relevant articles for the project? Is the reading even self-initiated? Suggests new articles to the PI?
- Proposes new experiments/projects?
- Is able to tell the PI her/his ideas don't make sense and exactly why? I.e. is ready to become a post-doc...
- Is communication with other lab members good? Are there issues that need to be settled?

For postdocs it is also be more important to talk about career trajectory and fellowships/meetings/talks and specific skills that must be acquired to seek the desired job be it in academia or outside.

I have been writing A LOT of recommendation letters for graduate school applications lately, since it's application season, and I found that drafting a recommendation is actually a great exercise in figuring out someone's strengths and weaknesses. Each graduate school will ask a slightly different set of questions which often makes you think about traits to describe in the letter (creativity, academic potential, perseverance, ability to thrive in a competitive environment, written and oral communication and so on and so forth). For each different person you need to identify what is great about them and what are their best traits as a scientist, which inevitably makes you think about possible shortcomings or areas of improvement. Why are they only top 2% in creativity but top 10% in written communication? If the person does not fit the best letter you can write, what would they need to do to earn a better letter?   What usually happens with letters is that someone asks you sometimes 2 weeks and sometimes 2 days before the deadline and you put something together, but if you start with the ideal letter in mind 2-3 years in advance, could you actually work with someone to get there?

Photo credit: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

How to start a "grant club"

Starting a lab is sometimes a lonely pursuit. You are now in charge of everything and must have the final say on papers and grants that go out. While it may have been like this even before your transition, now your grants do not benefit from the shelter of your mentor's name and the success of your new lab depends on them.

Finding good readers becomes really important, because you need people who may not fully understand your field to take a serious look to your proposal and give you feedback. The more detailed and honest it is, the better. While senior investigators with experience in obtaining NIH funding will help, sometimes they have time only for a passing look and you are still wondering whether there is something you should change. Since there are eight of us who were hired in the past few years, we organized and started a monthly "grant club", where someone submits their latest effort for slaughter. R01 aims or full proposals, foundation grants or career award applications are sent out to everyone and dissected over pizza and beers. After 6 months everyone seems to really like it, in particular the fact that we all provide a lovingly brutal sounding board to test ideas. Now we started adopting stragglers from other departments, who have an interest in neuroscience.

The recipe is simple, 1) make a Doodle and find a day when most people can come, 2) the host/grant writer sends out their draft a few days before, 3) the host gets pizza/beer or fancier fare and other people can chip in (Girls, if I guy is hosting, remember the fruit and cookies...), 4) to break the ice you can ask for advice on how to get students or can just start complaining about things you would like to change in your institution, 5) discuss the grant. Do the aims weave a good story? Is the questions asked approaching a fundamental mechanism? Can you even tell what the fundamental mechanism studied is?   Is it too much work? Too little work? Is it cohesive? If Aim 1 doesn't work, will everything fall apart? and so forth and so on. Be nice and honest, but more importantly try and be helpful.

Which brings me to a sticky issue, be mindful of the purpose of these meetings to find the right mix of colleagues. As far as I can tell, we all really care about each other's success and we all enjoy discussing each other's science. Many of us don't have a chance to talk apart from this monthly occasion and it is great to bring everyone together. You may already have a wonderful group of colleagues that have offices right next to yours and that you meet often for coffee. Or you are in a small place where there are only a couple new hires or in a big place where everyone is competing and spying on everybody else. Then I would say, propose an online grant club with friends at other universities or meet with people at other local institutions. It makes such an enormous difference to have a cohort to lean on and if you have no grants coming up, meet anyways to talk about science, lab management or
which grants people have applied to.

Biotium GelRed and GelGreen to replace ethidium bromide

We would like to run agarose gels without ethidium bromide to avoid the need of dealing with toxic waste and to reduce the use of dangerous chemicals in the lab. We talked to quite a few vendors about this and started trying things out.

We started with AMRESCO EZ-Vision dyes which are SYBR Green based and were not very happy with them. Staining was very weak and we could not reliably image the gels on our existing UV image acquisition system without a SYBR filter. We had no intention of buying a new image acquisition system just for this so we kept looking. 500uL $89.52 from VWR

We tried Promega Diamond Nucleic Acid dye was also pretty weak and it is not an in-gel stain, so requires additional time for post-staining. We decided to keep looking. 500ul $70.00 from Promega

Finally, we started having good results with Biotium GelRed. GelRed is very sensitive and looks orange/red on the UV transilluminator like EtBr. GelGreen was not quite as bright, so we focused on GelRed, but optimization was needed. We had two primary issues: 1) bands which are very close to each other appear like they are fused together and the molecular weight marker was just a smear, 2) bands sometimes ran at a different weight than expected.
Since one of our genotyping PCRs needs to distinguish between a 400 and 480bp band it was very important to get good separation. Biotium recommended to reduce the amount of dye in the gel or to try post-staining because both the separation issue and the run length issue could be due to the larger size of the Biotium dye which can impair DNA motility. We lowered the amount of in-gel stain from 10,000X to 40,000X and it still worked pretty well, but a range of 20-30,000X may work best (around 2ul for a 50mL gel). Another way to improve separation is to post-stain if necessary and post-staining is relatively quick (15-20 mins) and does not require destaining. In addition the post-staining dye can be reused saving some extra money. Because of the size of the dye, agarose concentration is also critical and concentrations above 1% are not recommended. 500ul $104.42 from VWR

All in all for regular genotyping PCR which is most of what we do the GelRed works very well and while it's somewhat more expensive than the other dyes, it is a substantial difference in sensitivity. In the end the decision comes to whether you want to have an EtBr free gel bench and how much money you are going to spend for the more expensive dye.
5g of EtBr ($64.20) will make 1L of 10,000X solution (final concentration 5mg/mL), while 1L of GelRed at 30,000X would cost $35,000. Yet, 1L of stock will make 100,000 100mL gels: if you run 10 100mL gels a week or around 500 gels a year, you'll spend $0.32 in EtBr or $417.68 in GelRed. I would be interested in finding out how much you spend yearly for EtBr disposal.

When is my grant getting reviewed?

Have you ever tried to google when a study section meets or when to expect an answer back?  While this is easy to find out for the NIH, it's not necessarily that straightforward for foundations. So as a followup to my list of grants, I thought I'd have a ongoing post with a list of timelines. If you have any additional timeline info for other grants, let me know in a comment and I'll update the post.

NIH grants (see here for full list):

Submission: R01 1st cycle Feb 5 - 2nd cycle Jun 5 - 3rd cycle Oct 5
K99 1st cycle Feb 12 - 2nd cycle Jun 12 - 3rd cycle Oct 12
Renewals, resubmission are a month after first submission
Review: 1st cycle Jun-Jul - 2nd cycle Oct-Nov - 3rd cycle Feb-Mar
Scores: 2-3 days after review
Comments: 2 weeks after review
Decision (council meeting): 1st cycle Aug or Oct - 2nd cycle Jan - 3rd cycle May
Award: 1st cycle Sept*-Dec - 2nd cycle Apr - 3rd cycle Jul
Notes: * Funny things happen in September at the NIH because of the end of the fiscal year, so be mindful of possible Sept awards. I've heard both of grants being pushed through quickly or being delayed or cut.

Simulated resubmission scenario. FAST (13 months): R01 first submission Feb 5/close but not fundable scores back Jul 15/resubmission Jul 5/good score Nov 2/council approval Jan 15/money comes Apr 1
SLOW (17 months): R01 first submission Feb 5/close but not fundable scores back Jul 15/resubmission Nov 5/good score Mar 4/council approval May 20/money comes Jul 1

Muscular Dystrophy Association research grants:
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4134#.UqfGtxZ5nzI
MDA will resume RFAs in the Fall 2014: http://mda.org/research2/grant-types

LOI submission: Fall cycle Jun 15 - Spring cycle Dec 15
LOI response: 1-3 days after submission (this is very fast and you only have 4 weeks left)
Submission: Fall cycle Jul 15 - Spring cycle Jan 15
Review: Fall cycle October - Spring cycle April
Scores/Decision: Fall cycle Nov/Dec - Spring cycle May/June
Award: Fall cycle Feb 1 - Spring cycle Aug 1 (8 months after LOI)
Notes: 11/2013 - grants below 90% score rejected, top 10% pending Board Meeting decision on funding pay-line
3/2014 - Feb 1 2014 grants funded starting May 1

March of Dimes general research grants:
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4045#.UqfGRRZ5nzI

LOI submission: April 30 (check current RFA)
LOI response: by Jul 15
Submission: Sept 15
Review: February/March
Scores/decision 2014: rejections end of March, acceptance April/May (can be as late as mid May)
Award: Jun 1 (13 months after LOI)
Notes: 8/2013 - following LOI acceptance 22% funding rate

NARSAD Young Investigator Grants:
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4153#.UxE-RRbfbzI

Submission: in February (keep checking in January for the Call for Applications to come out, in 2014 it was February 19th)
Review: ?
Scores/Decision: August (2014 award decisions starting Aug 7 and rolling)
Award: January 15th (11 months after applications)

The New PI hits the 6th month slump: how do you keep proactive?

Caspar David Friedrich - Der Monch am Meer (detail)

I have been quiet for a while because I did not know what to say. Six months ago, the day before I started my new job I was full of excitement (here), but now I barely feel I can keep my head above water. It is somewhat impossible to describe the tsunami that hits you when you start running a lab: 1) the navigation of a completely new administrations with its quirks and habits, 2) ordering, including choosing things, getting quotes, keeping track of orders, generating relationships with vendors, 3) hiring new people, 4) training new people, sometimes multiple new people at the same time, 5) managing renovations, animal rooms, animal protocols and orders, 6) reconciling budgets, 7) writing papers, 8) writing grants, 9) developing new relationships with colleagues and collaborators, and last but not least 10) deciding where the lab must go and where to place your bets on your future and on the future of everyone you hired. You are hit from every corner, every day with some kind of issue or emergency and because everything is new to you, every decision has to be pondered. Some days I literally feel like I cannot breathe.

The lab is somewhat moving, grinding away slowly, finding a rhythm between having everything we need to get things going and doing experiments. A couple of proposals are out and papers are still lagging. I am exhausted most of the time: most days I have no time to read or write or even think and get home late at night in a stupor. I try to continue to do busy work on the laptop as I watch TV, but not much gets done. I started taking vitamin B and drinking caffeine again to get me going in the morning. It's the 6th month slump: when you still remember how things were moving at a steady clip before and you feel completely enveloped in molasses. It is also vital to keep moving because things need to get done and you can see that sooner or later you will get there. But you are questioning everything.

You do not want to talk to people because they will think you are weak and not worthy, so you weather the bad days and rest a little on the good days. Then you talk to your peers and everyone is going through this or has experienced it at some point. Someone warned you at the beginning that the first year was going to be tough. In light of all this I decided to share because it's not just you, reader, or me, it's growing pains for a lot of people.

In the midst of all this, I opened my iPad after 6 months and discovered that way back then I had bought "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People"by Steven Covey and I started from Habit 1: Be Proactive. I liked that Covey brought up the serenity prayer from 12-step programs "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference". The adrenaline roller coaster of jumping from "crisis" to "crisis" always reminds me of an addiction-inducing paradigm, but that may just be the neuroscientist in me. Fight-or-flight, reward, fight-or-flight, reward. The trick here is to break the vicious cycle and to prioritize, but also to know which battles to take on and focus on those. You hear the words "time management" thrown at you endlessly in your first year, but being proactive is different. It's identifying the things that are important and that you can change (either in yourself or in others) and purposefully act on those. This also require to get out of your shell and to talk to a lot of different people to better understand your field, your institution and your new role. There may be things you didn't know you could change and people you didn't know had the power to change them. There may be things that you truly cannot change or control and you have to find your way around them or don't let them get to you. I'm practicing and we'll see how it goes....

What do you have to do to get noticed?

A friend forwarded a recent Harvard Business Review article about why incompetent men get promoted and competent women remain unnoticed, which has been doing the rounds this week. The argument is that men display enough arrogance and bravado to get the to the top by the sheer force of their charm and self-promotion, until they are found out to be incompetent....leaving many competent and qualified women in the rubble because women do not display similar behaviors. Though this may ring true sometimes, there are multiple layers to discuss and I recommend a great blog post from Athene Donald, a physicist in Cambridge and women's champion.

What struck me more than anything in the article is trying to figure out what you need to do to get noticed in your field. Through the years I have had numerous conversations with friends and colleagues on how to best "spin stories" for papers and grant proposals. How much of a claim are you willing to make based on the data you have to increase the appeal of your work? How do you promote yourself and get invited to meetings and seminars? What is the best attitude? There are people who are well recognized in their field and very well published and funded, yet there is chatter at meetings on how their work is derivative, how they jump from cool project to cool project without really getting to the bottom of anything and how their talks are all hot air and overblown hypotheses. Yet, if you strive to do transformative science and fail a lot in the process, but 50% of what you produce is true, is that enough?

And then there are the rare people who are humble and shrewdly present their work simply. "We think this could be interesting, what do you think?" and the talks they give just blow your mind with how amazing the data is. But, these are the minority. Maybe because they are so brilliant, they don't need the puffed out feather and peacock tail in full display.

Nowadays, sadly or maybe just like everything else, your success in science depends on self-promotion. You have to give talks and then be invited to give more talks where you have to explain to a wide audience why what you do is cool. In your grants you have to rope people who may know very little about what you do into choosing you above other hundreds of applicants and giving you money. Even in hiring people you have to present you new lab in a light that will make it appealing for a top applicant to come work for you. The purists hate this and complain to no end about how your science should speak for itself. But to be fair the level of specialization is such that maybe 4-5 people in the world will really intimately understand what you do and these often will not be reviewers for your grants and papers.

It is a constant struggle in my mind on when to shake those back feathers and fan that tail. Do I tout my own horn at every little accomplishment in my department? Should I remind people who invited me for talks in passing that I was invited? Do I walk up to important people at meetings and just introduce myself pitching my "awesome" research? How much can I comfortably spin a story to make it more appealing still feeling that I am true to the findings?

Is it a female thing? After all female peacocks don't need that tail, they have other priorities. But while it may be more common in women to be humble and matter-of-fact, I'm not sure this is just a gender issue. It's more your natural inclination and your training, since as a scientist you must trust in the data above all. This is going to be a very interesting learning experience about human nature more than anything. Meeting season is starting soon, so I better start getting ready.

Photo credit:  Jebulon (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons