What's in an aim? Specific Aims for your R01

Note added after R01 review: Beware of this post. The big picture strategy backfired big time. Find out how here.

"Mirror mirror on the wall, what are aims to win it all?"
Everyone will tell you that most of the time spent on writing your R01 should be spent on the Specific Aims page. You should have an aims page written up to a month or two in advance of the deadline and start shopping your ideas around with the NIH and colleagues. Then you write and rewrite and polish your aims until you submit. Having just completed my first R01 submission, I can only say that I couldn't agree more. Yet, this experience left me completely confused about the whole process.
I have been contributing to someone else's grants for 15 years and writing my own for almost 10, and I still felt I had no idea what I was doing. I had the aims page ready two months in advance and sent it to my senior advisors, who tweaked a couple of things here and there, and said everything looked great. Then three weeks before submission, the s#%t hit the fan. I had been oscillating between two versions of the research approach because I felt that one of my three aims was too descriptive and too much work. If I thought the whole thing was overambitious, the study section was surely going to nix me! So the specific aims kept changing too.
At a loss on what to do, I ended up at one of my old universities, which is much bigger than my current one and has people in my field I can talk to. After talking to various friends, I sent the specific aims page to a colleague who is on one of the study sections that could have reviewed my grant. A study section that is notoriously difficult and that I have been trying to avoid like the plague. He told me bluntly that with aims like that my grant would get triaged and proceeded to point out where things were problematic. What he didn't know is that all the things he pointed out, corresponded to the passages I was struggling with in writing the research approach. The fact that he could tell from just looking at that page where the grant was lacking was terrifying and thrilling at the same time. I set up a meeting to talk about things. Decided to drop the grant and move submission to October, then spoke to another mentor, who said maybe I should just change the focus of the aims to better fit the data I have. And so the Great Aim Rewrite began.
What I have learned from it is that everyone recommends what works for them. Throughout my postdoc I had been trained to follow a very basic formula "Our preliminary data show that....leading to our hypothesis that....We will prove this hypothesis by...(using bullets and listing specific experiments)" My mentor who had multiple millions in grant money swore by it. I've had an 80% success rate.
Someone told me to write more experimental detail summarizing the grant, someone else told me to remove all experimental detail and outline the big questions I would answer. Someone said the title of the aims was supposed be like the title of a figure legend. No, a question! Why was it not a goal to reflect the fact that it was an aim? I wrote and rewrote and reformatted. Then I tried tie breakers. I sent an experimental and a non-experimental version to a former mentor who used to have 5 R01s (yes, at once). Which one did she like best? The big picture one. Completely extricating myself from experimental detail literally makes my skin crawl, so I left at least one sentence per aim saying what I was going to do. But most space was taken up by framing the question and the hypothesis, and by saying how the results would push the field forward. With as much specificity as I could muster.
The exercise was very useful because by clearly having to articulate the specific contribution and impact of each aim, I was forced to really think about how everything fit together. I mirrored the structure in the Innovation section with three primary conceptually innovative domains. Then concluded each aim with a big picture summary sentence. Is it going to be enough? Do I feel this is a killer grant? Not in the least. I think that it's a reasonable effort given the data we have at this moment. I hope not to be embarrassed and I'm just trying to get scored.
When I sent the latest version of the Specific Aims to my K99 program officer, she immediately suggested the study section I wanted (not the one I dreaded), which means that my aim is true (pardon the pun). I made the strongest case I could in the cover letter and I secured two institutes for assignment. Now we just wait and see.
My recommendation is to not be bashful and send your specific aims page out to as many people as you can. Don't freak out if everyone has a favorite formula for you. I realized the whole thing is so stressful that it becomes a sort of superstition: "I was wearing this shirt when my team won, so I'll wear this shirt for every game". Whatever format you decide on, I highly recommend the exercise of writing down a sentence on how each aim fits in your field and how it will push it forward. It really helped me think about how to frame everything else.

The end of the R01 twin strategy: what I learned

Despite the absolute madness of the past two months, I was still holding on to the hope I would be able to submit two R01s for the June deadline as detailed in a post earlier this year. People had conflicting advice about the effectiveness of submitting two big grants at once to increase probability of funding, but many were intrigued. I hung on to it as long as I could for psychological reasons that is not advisable discussing here, but instrument access to obtain critical preliminary data for one of the grants just fell through, so it is not happening despite the fact that half of it is already written.

I did learn some things in the process. Mainly that you really don't know what you have until you seriously start writing. I have a white board in my office where I outlined multiple versions of the specific aims, then I wrote both sets of specific aims out by the end of February, with three months to spare. One grant was clearly the top contender to make it to the deadline with flying colors...until it wasn't. I started writing it first because it was the easiest to write (I've been writing some version of it for almost 10 years now). It's very exciting, it has 10 years worth of preliminary work and solid preliminary data, but it requires a lot of moving parts. Multiple collaborators who are not getting back to me with what I need, other collaborators to help me move into new directions with limited instrument access. As I was writing, I became very hopeful that this project will be really cool and significant, but to be that, all the parts need to work together and right now they are not gelling. I need more time, not to write, but actually to coordinate everything and put the moving parts together. In addition, I don't know why, but I had no response from any of the program officers I contacted with the specific aim page despite the fact that this was tailored to fit nicely into their programs. We were just awarded a small pilot grant just with the purpose to move this research further and the larger project behind this is funded until 2017, so there is absolutely no reason for me to submit this before October.

So I'm left with the other one, which is my R00 conversion. I was very worried about it because I felt unsure of what to do with the preliminary data, but as I was putting everything together and deciding how to structure it and going to meetings to figure out how it would fit in the field. It just came together in my head as I was writing it. I think I have preliminary data for every single aim and subaim, I think it's feasible and cool and I've managed to squeeze in some fancy new techniques just for safe measure. Because it doesn't require anyone but us, and uses the people I already have, it's pretty straightforward to put together, so I am aiming to finish writing the 12 pages of the research proposal by the end of this week, which will give me 4 weeks to work with the scientific writer the university has given me as support and to circulate with my mentoring committee for their feedback. As a back-up one of the aims will be sent as an internal pilot grant which would support the establishment of the fancy new techniques in case the reviews come back asking for more preliminary data. Plus a DoD call just came out asking for pre-applications on this same topic, and the NIH grant can be adapted for that. The twins are splitting in multiple grants and now my deadlines are:
June 1st - pilot grant on R01 #1
June 5th - R01 #1
June 10th  - DoD letter of intent for R01 #1 back-up
October 1st - DoD grant, if selected
October 5th - R01 #2
November  5th - R01 #1 resubmission?

So I will eventually have two R01s in the same cycle by the end of this year and they have spawned two more proposals which now may turn into twin Irish twins...

Interviewing for a postdoc? Questions you should ask.

Following the "Questions you should ask" for the faculty job search, I was asked for a similar post for the postdoctoral search.

This is another really important decision that you'll have to make to further your career and it should be appropriately researched...we're scientists after all and we should research the lab we plan to join as well as we perform a thorough literature search before embarking on a new project. Aditi Nedkarni already wrote a great post on LinkedIn Pulse with a list of excellent questions you should go through.

Most of the questions that she suggest such as "How does the PI deal with conflict?" "Does the PI assist with experiments? Picking a project?' are much easier to ask to current fellows in the lab, because the PI may have a different prospective or think they do a good job when in reality the lab has a different view. There will always be pros and cons with a postdoctoral mentor and you have to figure out whether the cons are too much for you. Some people thrive in environments which can make other people miserable. I always found that as a postdoc, I was very honest with prospective lab members so that they could make an informed choice. If a PI does not allow you to speak with the current lab members alone, it's a red flag. Even for Skype interviews, I always organize a second interview where I leave the lab alone with the candidate for half an hour, so that they can talk without me present.

I think that the most important predictor of success is "How many people from the lab went on to obtain a faculty position?". If you are in the same field, you should pretty much know because your PhD mentor should know the person and tell you about their progeny. Some labs have the list of former trainees and their current position on their website, but it doesn't hurt to ask the PI in person. Especially now that the job market is so bad. This is a difficult question if you are interested in working with a new PI who hasn't produced any progeny yet, but you should ask them about their strategy for helping people with their careers. The way experienced and new PIs answer these questions should tell you lots about what kind of mentor they are going to be.

Before interviewing you should prepare to answer questions about you and your research (see this article for advice), but also think long and hard about what kind of project and environment you want. Then you tailor your questions to figure out whether the lab is a good fit. It can also be useful to have your PI put you in touch with colleagues that did their postdoc in the labs you're interested in. I just had a long conversation with a friend's student and it turned out my postdoctoral advisor may not be the best scientific fit, but I could recommend several other faculty at the same institution.

At the end of your PhD, your ideas on your future may still be nebulous and that is perfectly okay. I would strongly recommend that you interview in as many labs as you'd like and that you explore different possibilities. Do not feel like you are wasting people's time/money. As faculty, we are aware in the investment we make in finding the right people in our lab, and we are aware that good candidates are few and far between and that many people will have multiple options. As long as you are gracious and open with your decision process, people will not get upset and even if you decide for a different lab, you will have forged scientific relationships for the future. Just in case you'll need a second postdoc for any reason, or a faculty position one day...

On the faculty job market? Questions you should ask.

It's negotiation time! You have found a university you really like and they like you back, or maybe
they like you and you're wondering whether you like them. A lot of people say that looking for a job is like dating, but in this case you are expected to make a life-long commitment after two two-day encounters and a few phone calls. What are the things you should know before jumping in?

I polled Twitter and listed all questions I wished I had known to ask, but getting answers may be tricky. You cannot ask all of these to the same person and in some cases you may need to innocently ask the students at lunch, or ask friends who may have inside knowledge. Questions are a way to show that you really want to "get" the culture of the place where you are interviewing, but are also necessary information gathering to make an informed choice and pull out possible red flags. You can start by reading this great article from The Professor is In for some guidance and examples.

With tenure in mind:
- What are the requirements for tenure?
- How many R01 funded faculty are there in the institution?
- How many active researchers are there in the department? (This can be touchy, tread carefully)
- How is the grant administration pre and post-award? (This is more important than you think and can be asked to some of the new faculty. I had someone ask me this during the last hiring round.)
- Do you have grant writers and consultants on staff? Does the department/university cover the cost?
- What kind of internal grants/ training grant are available to me?
- Is there a mentoring plan for new faculty? How do you assure that they will be successful?
- Will I be immune from teaching and service for at least one year?
- How much teaching will be required? How large will the classes be?
- How is teaching evaluated at this university? How will I know I'm on track?
- Do I need to have graduated a PhD student to get tenure?
- If hired with tenure, is it automatic from the beginning? Or there will be a lag and will I have to go through the process again?

Graduate program:
- How many students does the program accept?
- What are the requirement for incoming students? How does the selection process work?
- What is your standard qualifying exam? (This can be asked to the students at lunch and can tell you loads about how challenging the program is.)
- What are the requirements for taking a students in my lab? Do I need funding?
- How long will the program pay for the student?

To recent new faculty:
- Why did you decide to come here?
- Are you happy here? (Tread very carefully on this one. It may need to be phrased differently. But it's very important. There are a million reasons why people are unhappy, so take the answers with a grant of salt. But if some people seem unhappy, you need to find out why. The people they put on your schedule are the ones they trust to say nice things and they're hiding the really unhappy ones.)

Negotiation:
- Who will I negotiate the start-up with?
- What was the average start-up/salary for faculty in the past few years? (I don't know that you can ask this directly, but you should know the answer before you start negotiating. See this link for salary info for colleges)
- If they didn't already do so, could you show me the lab space? Which building? Who are the neighbors? What/where is the shared equipment available to me?
- Do the start-up funds expire? (They shouldn't, but some institutions have definite budgets)
- Do the start-up funds come in installments or are they all available at once?

Remember to get everything in writing. As a rule of thumb universities lie. They lie for multiple reasons, often because things change and internal struggles alter priorities. Your chair may be powerful one day but not the next. Your school may lose admissions money, while someone else may get a huge philanthropic donation and suddenly have the ear of the provost and the president. It is literally the Hunger Games of the Deans. You are fresh and shiny and exciting and have all the power when you negotiate, once you sign most of that power is gone. Make sure you get everything you need and then some.

The list is hardly an exhaustive one, but it's a good starting point. Feel free to comment with more questions to add and continue reading for questions from the comments:

1) How much (%) salary is expected on grants? If you have a K/R00 or small R, do they expect less than if you have an R01. 
2) Does the University have an incentive plan if you meet a minimum % salary support?
3) What % of indirect costs come back to you? Into flexible spending accounts? When and how long available. Also found some places will to offer more back for smaller mech grants to help get lab going. 

And now year 3 begins!

It's 730 days of being an Assistant Professor. After the absolute exhaustion and chaos of the first six months and the light at the end of the tunnel of finishing year one (Y1), year two (Y2) was a very different beast. The mad foundation grant writing of Y1 paid off, so most of Y2 was devoted to getting the lab going to gather data for R01 funding and getting our work "on the map". Plus settling into the job of the professor, teaching, giving a few talks, joining a couple of thesis committees, a faculty search committee. As I've mentioned before, this job is like weight-lifting: once you're comfortable with 100lbs, you bench 150, then 200, and so on and so forth. In talking with senior faculty, everybody says it never gets easier, you just become better at juggling more and more things. I can totally see myself facing the same struggles Scitrigrrl described on Tenure She Wrote in her post about being a 3rd year faculty: being tired and overwhelmed and pulled in multiple directions. With the end of the newness (I can't say any more "I've only been here a year and a half"), come several responsibilities which are mostly self-imposed: the need to bring in substantial funding, to provide job security to people in the lab, to set the stage to become established in the field, to be a good community member.

I'm not frantic or scared yet, but I feel a sense of urgency right now. During Y2 I mostly felt good, I was learning, exploring, getting stuff done. Now, I'm on shakier ground. One day I feel like I'm completely inadequate and have a meltdown, like the one I described a couple of weeks ago when I freaked out about a talk I had given. The next day everything is rosy when I get a 2 as a mentor on my postdoc's NRSA scores. A 2 is "outstanding", thank you very much! Of course I had a senior investigators with oodles of grants and multiple NRSA mentees as co-mentor on the application, so maybe he's a 1 and I'm a 3, but still :) So one day I'm happy, one day I'm panicking. I've gotten over looking up exes on Facebook, and instead I pick at emotional scabs by PubMed-ing people in my cohort. How long did it take them to get that first paper out? How much better is their CV than mine? How much worse? The new NIH Biosketch format, where you have to sell yourself and your contributions to science, is not helping at all.

It also doesn't help that I'm putting out fires all day long and sometimes I look at the clock and it's 5pm and I haven't opened my Research Approach file for the R01...or is it R01s? I have two sets of Specific Aims written, but time is flying aways at an incredible speed and preliminary data is not coming in fast enough. I am still stuck making all the decisions in the lab and I really don't want to be there. Maybe one of my goals for Y3 can be to learn how to let people in the lab walk on their own two feet. It's so hard to let go, but if don't do it, I'm not sure I can survive.

Networking 101: Why follow-up emails matter

Now more than ever with horrible job prospects and abysmal funding rates your network can make you or break you in academia. People in your network will mention jobs that could be a good fit, will provide collaborators and co-PIs for grants, will give a second opinion on grants and papers, will invite you for seminars and pick your for talks at conferences, and overall will make your life much easier. I have discussed why networking in important and how to network here, but going to back to back meetings the past two weeks reminded me of a time honored tradition, the "nice to see you" email.

Johannes Vermeer - Lady with her maidservant
holding a letter

After I received a couple of lovely notes, including one from the senior PI who had prompted the
meltdown chronicled in my last post, I took half an hour to send my own. It doesn't take long, since "It was great to see you, I enjoyed catching up" or "I enjoyed your talk/poster" or "Thank you for taking the time to ..." followed by similar pleasantries is all it takes. Maybe you had brief discussions over coffee about possible collaborations you'd like to consolidate, and you can mention the specifics. If it's someone you just met and they have a LinkedIn profile, it also makes sense to connect on LinkedIn, so that you are permanently in their gravitational circle.

There is really no downside of this, as long as your correspondence is brief and pleasant, AND it is directed to someone with whom you made a connection. Do not email the keynote speaker or everyone at the meeting, unless you have had a meaningful 5-10 min conversation about their work or your work. Some people will reply and consolidate the relationship, other won't, but in any case you have planted a seed to grow your network.
I have never been particularly good at remembering to follow up, but whenever I get one of these notes, it always reminds me of how important it is. As humans we want to feel connected and appreciated, and with all the rejection of grants and papers going around these days, it's good practice to be sociable and polite...good karma may follow.

Photo credit: Johannes Vermeer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

More thoughts on the new PI transition: recovering from a bad talk

As a new principal investigator, I'm always in a frenzy to promote my work, so that I'm going to establish myself in my field(s) presenting cool new data. I have written before about trying to develop your ability to be a bit of peacock (shaking your fancy tail around) and how uncomfortable it can be, and every time I go a conference nowadays I am stricken by a sense of doom. Conferences used to be fun as a trainee when you saw wonderful stories from senior investigators and were inspired to come up with new ideas and apply new techniques. Now I'm always teetering between feeling small and irrelevant because there are large groups and consortia which will move faster than I even could, and panicking that I will be crushed because my lab cannot generate data quickly enough or because my questions are not interesting/visible enough.

So this week I am at conference where my abstract was selected for a talk. This is a brand new collaborative project with a paper in revision and I was very excited it was picked, until I started working on the talk and realized that I still don't have a stunning conclusion, at least as it would be expected by the type of people attending this meeting. At the meeting there was a complex combination of stressors: 1) it's a specialized conference for a disease foundation that funds my work, but I feel a bit of an impostor because I focus on a specific aspect of the disease that has nothing to do with the major therapeutic targets people here care about; 2) some of the experts knowing the clinical details and the fine biochemical details much better than I do were going to be there, so I had been studying and rereading the literature like mad while preparing my talk; 3) I really wanted to give people a good show hoping to get noticed by the program officers in attendance, potential collaborators, pharmaceutical companies and colleagues.

As the talk took shape I began to worry about its scope: it was picked from the abstract, but should I give an overview of the lab instead since it was 20 minutes and the invited speakers had more general abstract? Or should I just focus on the abstract which is looking at a specific model which really didn't provide information relevant for the specific crowd that would be attending? In the middle of the freakout, I spent a couple of late nights trying to generate last minute data that would be interesting to the clinicians and other researchers. My postdoc had not been successful in generating some data I needed to make me more comfortable presenting the work as it was, and my undergrad had decided to go on spring break without letting me know until the very last minute...
I was back in that state of feeling like half a postdoc half a PI that I described a couple of weeks ago, where I'm stuck between doing the work and focusing on the big picture. Maybe it's a phase, hopefully a growth spurt, in any case it's very uncomfortable.

I think I'm usually a good speaker and I have developed some good talks. I enjoy public speaking and am very happy to have an audience. Despite these premises the whole thing was a mess. I started focusing on the abstract and then realized I wasn't going to fill 20 minutes, so I backtracked and added a shortened version of my usual spiel on findings that would be more interesting to the audience. I practiced like crazy (which I usually don't do) to the point where I started messing up over and over again, and kept modifying the intro slides to almost the last minute, struggling with the transitions and actually forgetting some key detail in one which likely pissed some people off. I think I did an okay job delivering the talk though I got nervous a couple of times, and had some issues with the Q&A since the questions ranged in disparate directions. I stepped off the podium feeling dejected and as I watched the other speakers discuss the awesome things they do in their labs, I wished I had taken a completely different approach.  I should have taken more time to flesh out the part of the talk which is more comfortable for me and which would be more interesting to the audience describing some additional published studies without spending 10 minutes on the more problematic new project. One reason why I chickened out from that is that the big dog in my field, whose shadow I need to escape, was talking in the same session after me, and I graciously mentioned he would do a much better job that I ever would at describing some of the mechanisms involved (which incidentally he did without ever even acknowledging me or my work). Everyone I know said I did well, but don't they always? A much better benchmark is when strangers come up to you to ask questions or to say how they learned something new...

Next week, I'm going to another meeting which is on a different topic and with a much more fitting crowd and I'm just presenting a poster, so the pressure is low. A couple of friends who have been very successful and are rising stars will be there and will definitely make me feel like I still need to reach my full potential, but that is another story for another post. There might be a component of raging impostor syndrome  bringing me down, but the bottomline is that I wonder whether this also reflects the struggle of new investigators to becoming "established" and "developing their identity" which senior people constantly bring up when talking about tenure.

Ideas, comments, advice are welcome.

How do you let go? Developing your ability to delegate on the tenure-track.

When during your tenure track do you stop being a postdoc and a PI at the same time? I am struggling at the moment with being pulled in multiple different directions and still doing the bench work, while managing the lab and various professorial tasks. Running a lab feels like being on strength training: first you lift 30 lbs, then 40, then 50, and as you get stronger the weight keeps piling on. Whatever you thought was overwhelming 6 months ago, has doubled in intensity now, yet you can manage or try to.

The biggest priority is finishing two papers: revisions on a collaborative project and submission on the lab's first manuscript. The pressure on paper #1 comes from not wanting to let my collaborators wait, while paper #2 is necessary for my R01 submission. Yet this month is a perfect storm of other commitments that cannot be moved: most of my teaching is happening now, I'm hosting a faculty candidate, I have to put together two progress reports and specific aims for two grants. Plus all the random BS that fills your day like meeting with seminar speakers, faculty meetings, tracking down orders, etc. Next month I'm gone for back to back conferences, so the clock is ticking. Since things are not moving as fast as I wanted with the papers, I took it upon myself to help speed things up, to the point that whenever I can, I do experiments for one paper in the morning and for the other in the afternoon. As I struggle to keep my head above water, I wonder, is this right? Am I supposed to be both postdoc and PI right now?

While my undergraduate advisor was a fierce micromanager, my doctoral and postdoctoral mentors were very laissez faire. Any pressure to publish, or do anything really, was completely self inflicted, but their careers did not depend on me at all. As a manager, I think I'm pretty hands off, but all my people are young and freshly graduated, and they still ask advice on experiments and data interpretation, so I want to be available to go over their data as necessary. Just for reference, my postdoctoral advisor never saw raw data I generated, ever...I think. Data was presented in fully structured lab meeting talks every 6 months or in manuscript form. Some of the questions in my mind are "How do I get them to the level of independence necessary to become a PI?", "Should I stop picking up their slack?" and "What kind of relationship do I want with my trainees?"

Honestly, I think my postdocs work a lot. They're at work on weekends and holidays and during snow storms. They'll be there whenever is necessary and would never think twice about coming in at odd hours to get me data for a deadline. Still I'm struggling to accept one of the most common advice I received while starting the lab "You have to remember that your people are not you". Even if I don't know where anything is in the lab any more, I'm stuck between two conflicting thoughts 1) that I'm faster and more motivated than they are, and I can get things done; and 2) that I don't have any idea of how long it takes to do something and I should just let them do their jobs. And this is the real conundrum, by stepping in as the fourth super-postdoc, am I helping or actually hindering their ability to become independent and more efficient? Am I making my life harder by doing two jobs, while I should give them time to get things done? I always try to lead by example, so by seeing me running around like a headless chicken (and deathly ill for the past week) should they be motivated or just realize that this job is crazy?

Any advice or comment would be greatly appreciated.

Getting my ducks in a row for the twin R01s

We are 18 weeks out from submission day and I have started putting all my ducks in a row to see if this crazy idea of submitting two R01s at once is really going to work.

Just a note on where I am coming from to put everything into prospective, since there was a really awesome discussion on Drugmonkey's blog about whether it makes sense for a new investigator to go big with multiple grants in rapid succession or at the same time.
My lab does two things which are in the same field, but that overall can be quite different and use different approaches and animal models. The reason why I do two things is that these two projects have been continuously funded for the past 7 years as I have been writing back to back grants on them for that long. My strategy is: the moment you get a grant, you write another grant, because money begets money. These projects got me four postdoctoral fellowships, and when I started my K99, I also received an equivalent internal grant for the other project. As a new faculty I have my R00 and I have equivalent (actually, a bit more) foundation funding for the other project. So the way I look at it, they're pretty much even. No project is new, no project has no history of continued funding/productivity, hopefully in the next few months I will have last author publications for both, and both projects have direct human disease relevance. Also, my start-up is fully banked, my R00 ends in 2016 and my other funding ends in 2017, so I am not panicking and I have money to resubmit these babies over and over again as I get comments on them for the next 2 years. I am not trying to brag, just saying that this is not a desperate ploy to con the NIH, this is just a strategy to keep my research program going the way it is....well, maybe a tad bigger. Only one R01 will mean I have to fire people in the long run. I have always felt that it takes 6 months to plan and write a good R01 and I'm not advocating that you do this if you don't have the data.

So, we were talking about ducks...These, in no particular order, are the initial steps I have taken.

- Put together an outline of the data we have and of the most compelling specific aims I can think of for both projects. Define what we need to move forward and define a timeline for obtaining the additional data for the specific aims.

- Peruse NIH Matchmaker (my new favorite website). You can paste you summary or specific aim page and find grants with similar scope to yours (see the description here). This allowed me to figure out how other people framed their questions. Some proposals were from direct competitors, but some were also from good colleagues, whom I immediately emailed them to ask for a copy of their Specific Aims. I also plan to discuss their strategy with them to see how they felt about their study sections.

- Based on the proposed experiments, contact the collaborators and co-PI to meet/Skype to discuss the preliminary experiment or resources needed and develop a timeline to obtain the data.

- Contact the grant writing service at my university to get organizational and editing assistance.

- Block out an afternoon once a week where I leave the lab to read and write in peace, since writing in my office is nearly impossible nowadays.

The next step is actually to sign up for the gym and get a packet of yoga lessons, so that I can keep sane while this is going on, as I'm also doing experiments on both papers (one in the morning and one in the afternoon)...

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
I don't miss Boston much, but I did love these ducklings.

The beginning of the R01 twin strategy

Parents of twins will probably laugh at my naivete, but as someone who always wanted two kids

Mother with twins

I always thought that twins were the most efficient way to achieve that goal: you have two of them at once and you're done. So I didn't bat an eye when one if my senior faculty mentors outlined what I will call the "R01 twin strategy" to me.

His reasoning was that getting a first R01 with early investigator status, a good funding history and good productivity should be doable, but the big ordeal is then getting that second R01, which is orders of magnitude harder that the first one. If my first R01 goes in in June and the second in October as planned, the Just In Time update for the second grant will include a funding decision for the first one...the unlikely chance that the first one gets funded could kill the second one. The alternative strategy is to develop them as fraternal twins, separate in all fashions (topic, approach and study section) and send them out into the world, i.e. the CSR, together. Then the JIT will say "pending" for both. If they get rejected, you resubmit together. If one gets funded, mazel tov! If both get funded, double mazel tov, golden confetti, and a serious discussion with the dean about lab space!!

It's bold and some will say it's suicidal. The huge issue is planning, because splitting the time to work on two major grants means half the writing effort and, in this funding climate, that could mean disaster. Yet, this is very appealing to me. I thought some of my other senior mentors would yell at me for proposing this, but they actually were intrigued and thought it was a viable idea as long as it was carried out correctly. Anyone who ever knew me in college knows my multitasking schedules to be the stuff of legend (and cause of endless teasing)... I have 19 weeks: if split in alternating 4 weeks intervals for each grant, that gives me 2 full months each, plus 3 extra weeks. So I'll commit to a pilot run: 1 week to outline 2 sets of specific aims, 4 weeks for each grant, then I'll decide whether to drop one or keep going on both. I've been on break from grant writing since August and this is an exciting new challenge.

I'll try and blog through it. Just as a preview of what's to come, today I had an experiment planning meeting with the co-PI on one of the grants and I started working on the new biosketch that will be used starting in June. This last endeavor caused a minor meltdown. You see, the new biosketch gets rid of your publication list and asks you to point out your major accomplishments and contributions to science, and I had nothing to say. What have I done that is really significant? I don't have a single major discovery that pushed science forward. No Science, Cell or Nature paper. How do I fake this? After a moment of panic and some soothing rounds of Candy Crush, I started writing possible contributions and grouping papers under them. I have been at the forefront of next-generation sequencing identifying multiple novel disease genes. I have defined guidelines for genetic testing in different population. I have pioneered blah, blah, blah. I have made sure healthy babies were born, goddammit! Okay, maybe R01 #2 will have a presentable biosketch...but that's the one with the least preliminary data. Where are the cell biology and mouse genetics pubs for R01 #1? Crap, that's the R00 conversion. This paper we're writing better be going out pronto!...And as you see I'm rapidly spinning out of control.

What do you think, readers, am I a) insane, b) ridiculously cocky, c) just right? Will I survive?

PS: I think the twins need names...

Are you a grasshopper or an ant? Risk taking in lab management

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about risk-taking behavior lately. Just a few months shy of two years I have six people in the lab and staring at their faces at lab meeting fills me with happiness and dread. I have made clear promises on the number of years I can support them, but they are all great and the last thing I want to do is to let them go in the middle of a promising project...hence the dread to keep the grant money flowing to keep them going if they need more time.

Before starting my lab I asked a lot of people for advice and put together a couple of collections of words of wisdom (here and here). The most frequent and consistent advice was to hire very carefully and take my time to hire the right people, which I followed religiously. I waited for the lab to be set up and I was more than a year in before I posted a job for my first postdoc and it took two rounds of interviews, a couple of thousand dollars in travel money and six months before I found the right fit. The other ones came very quickly, partially because grant money generated new jobs which needed to be filled.

While most of the advice I received was unanimous and made sense, there was one topic which was divisive: How to expand. Some people said: "Hire as much as you can, blow through your start-up and get as many hands on deck as possible to generate preliminary data for more grants", and others recommended the opposite: "Save your startup for a rainy day, plan very carefully and deliberately so that you don't exhaust your resources and become overwhelmed". So what to do? People have been equally successful with both strategies, but the "go all in" approach was more appealing to me so I ended up with a full lab in less then 2 years (I designed the lab space for 6 people and my ideal lab size is 6-10).

Am I right? Am I wrong? Will I die in the winter like a grasshopper? I don't think it's that simple. The more I do this, the more I realize that your lab is a projection of yourself. As you define the culture in the lab and assemble the combination of people you want, you also set the long term strategy. I am a very careful planner, but I am also not afraid of risk. I think a good proportion of risk can lead to higher pay offs and that you have to incorporate risk in your strategy. You accept a certain amount of risk if you invest in the stock market or if you purchase real estate in a transitional neighborhood. You have to able to roll the dice and see how it goes. In a small business you must include systemic losses in your business plan, i.e. that a percentage of your customers may not pay or that a certain amount of merchandise will be stolen. So my strategy is to have as many competent people as possible generate data in the best possible environment so that I will be able to write grants to support them further. Also, I like to collaborate widely and openly with the expectation that it's possible someone will screw me or take data from me, but that that is a risk worth taking in order to find people who will enrich my research instead.

I know people who are very uncomfortable with this approach, who got burned by past collaborators and do not want to share, or who want only 2-3 people in the lab to be able to work with them closely. And I think that's perfectly valid. What matters is that you have a strategy and that you figure out what is comfortable for you. We'll see how mine works out...

Dear Delta, it's not me, it's you, and we are done!

This is a somewhat unorthodox use of my blog, since this issue is only tangentially related to my science or lab management, but this is the most public forum I have. So I thought instead of sending in a complaint on Delta.com, why not put my letter out there for everyone to see.

Dear Delta, we are done! You are not my preferred airline any more and I will stop going out of the way to fly with you. We have been almost exclusive for 15 years and while many people kept saying "Are you crazy? Delta sucks!", I defended you "Have you ever flown United or American? They suck even more! I like Delta." This warm and fuzzy feeling towards you was helped by the fact that I maintained status (either Silver or Gold) for all this time and because you or your partners got me where I needed to go, hence I got to fly mostly Air France or KLM, which are lovely. Then this year it all ended and I am relegated back to Skymiles Member....despite logging almost 40,000 miles with you, going to Mumbai and Paris and Milan...plus a few US destinations. All because I am a very thrifty traveler and snatched up the best possible rates, so didn't reach the new $2,500 dollar limit you set.

Well, Delta, I travel a lot for work and for pleasure, but as a scientist I don't have much money and I like to be mindful of what I spend, so even when I fly on a funding agency's dime, I make sure I choose my flights carefully. For this reason, unfortunately, I have to tell you that you're back in the same pool with all the others and will receive no preferential treatment. I can cancel the silly AmEx credit card I never use and on which I most certainly never spend 25K in a year. You'll say "Good riddance! I only really care about the business class people, anyways. They book a few days in advance and reach that $2,500 limit in one sitting." Yeah, maybe you never loved me, then... Sometimes, it felt you did, but you may have been faking it. When I really think about it, all those business class upgrades were on KLM, Alitalia and Air France.

Goodbye, Delta. Now I can go where I have secretly wanted to go for a while and find a way to take Emirates everywhere (that camera on the nose of the plane rocks!) or maybe I can give a chance to Lufthansa. The world is my oyster....apart from Heathrow. I hate Heathrow like the plague and will do anything in my power to avoid it, even when the connecting flights are "oh so cheap".


PS: Note added in proof on 1/18. In the 2 weeks since this post I had to book 3 flights (2 domestic and 1 to Europe) and though one was still with Delta, one went to United and one went (oh, yes) to Emirates. I tried to see if I could use my 60,000+ miles to go to Europe, but Delta wanted a whopping 110,000 miles for the flight. I'm so glad I quit you...

Do you want out of the lab? Advice to prepare for your non-academic job search

In the middle of academic job season or right around when you're planning for your defense this Spring, you start thinking about jobs outside of academia. But how do you apply for a non-academic job? To complement my post on advice for the academic job search, I have enlisted a guest blogger from industry, a grad school friend who after leaving her postdoc has risen through the ranks of medical writing and pharma marketing, AND who through the years has interviewed many hopefuls like you. This is what she wants you to know.

So, you are sitting at the bench in your graduate program/post-doc and you say to yourself; “this is not where I want to be.” Although it has been nearly 8 years, I remember that moment. It wasn’t a singular epiphany, but more a series of telltale signs that couldn’t be ignored. First, my search for a postdoc lacked focus and long-term planning. Second, once landing a position, I realized quickly that I may be doing a second postdoc because of my lack of planning. Finally, and this is controversial for some, the financial realities of my academic life could not be reconciled with where I needed to be.

The non-academic job search is very different from an academic track. Even simple tasks like resume writing and post-interview thank you letters are not necessarily fundamental skills that one acquires in graduate school. But, after some trial and error and a little experience, I would like to share some tips and fundamentals to help you along the way.

Beginning the Process

The question you have to ask yourself is why not academia? Your answer to this question will help you focus your search. If you want to be at the bench, but not in academia, then you will be moving towards the industry postdoc (as a newly minted PhD or graduate student) or staff scientist (more experienced postdoc). If you do not want to be at the bench, then you must adjust how you view your PhD/postdoc experience and decipher how transferrable your skills will be in a different field. This is especially important if you a moving outside of science/medicine/healthcare.

This brings me to the resume. First, a resume IS NOT a CV. Second, your resume is not one size fits all. It must be adapted to the type of position you are applying for. Resume dos and don’ts include:

• Do make sure you describe the skills you gained during that time explicitly. A hiring manager (often the first line in the job process) has no idea what it takes to get a PhD; so, make sure you let them know. Your degree is your greatest asset in the absence of job experience.  
• Do let a group of peers read your resume, especially those employed in fields that interest you
• Do limit it to one page
• Do not send a resume which focuses on lab techniques when the job has nothing to do with working in a lab

Remember, a resume is a living document. Keep it up-to-date and ready to go. You never know when an opportunity will come.

Where do I look?

The first rule of any job search is to look within your network.  Start by reaching out to those whom have completed the job seeking process. Often times, their companies may have open positions or searches that are not being advertised. Furthermore, there is generally a financial incentive for people who refer candidates that are successful.  Now that you have a resume that you are pleased with, set up a LinkedIn profile. This will help you build professional connections beyond your immediate circle and give you an idea about the diversity of positions that exist. The LinkedIn job search allows to you tailor your search by company, geography, and certain key words and if you have the premium service, you can actually see how your profile compares with other applicants. If you know that you want to go into a specific field such as tech transfer/IP law, consulting, or data science, investigate potential on-campus recruiting events that could to internship/fellowship opportunities that could turn into permanent positions. Other useful searches include:

•         Drop-Out-Club (www.dropoutclub.org)
•        Biospace (www.biospace.com/jobs/search-results.aspx)

While I have not talked about the cover letter process, the writing of a cover letter generally follows the same rules of the resume.  These should be tailored to the position with only the relevant skills highlighted. If you are asking a colleague/associate/friend for a referral, please make sure that you send a cover letter with your resume. It is not their responsibility to sell you to an employer. They are a more direct conduit to the hiring process and putting more expectations on them beyond that is not professional.

At the end of the day, you have to be realistic about your immediate and long-term goals. Are you looking to “just get out” or do you have an ultimate goal? Just be prepared for a potentially long process that may not yield the results you expect.

The interview(s)

If you made it this far, CONGRATS!!! Depending on the field, your first interview may be with a hiring manager, HR representative or recruitment company. This person will be looking at your general qualifications and potential workplace compatibility red flags (i.e. Is this person crazy?). They may have some general knowledge about people with your background based on their experience, but don’t expect them to have an intimate knowledge of your field or explicit skill set. This is where your cover letter and resume are keys.

 In preparation for your interview, please review the website and review your potential interview roster on LinkedIn (if  known). If this is a referral, do try to speak with your contact regarding the company. I know it seems like common sense, but I’ve interviewed people that had no real idea about the company or what we did. If the company is public, review the annual report as insight into company strategy. Regarding printed copies of your resume, always have a couple just in case your interviewer doesn’t bring one of their own.

Most interviewers will give you their cards, please make sure send a thank you note post-interview. It seems to be a dying art amongst the younger job-seeking crowd these days. Send them individually (no mass emails), and note that while it may not get read, it will be noticed if one is not sent. If you manage to land a position, please note that they may want you in as early as 2 weeks after the interview. So, be truly ready to roll!

Final thoughts

You’ve been through the entire process and it hasn’t yielded one hit. Look, it happens. You will have to go through several rounds of this process over the course of your non-academic career. The keys to success are analogous to those of acquiring your PhD:

•       You have to possess staying power, “stickwithitness” even when it seems like an impossible task
•        Do you research and be thoughtful and realistic about your prospects
•       Be prepared for an unexpected result/opportunity. You never know when/where it will come
•       PROOFREAD, PROOFREAD, PROOFREAD

All the best with your job search!!!

2014 as The New PI

Following DrugMonkey's lead I put together a year in review post, as dictated by the blog meme rules:
-Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.

Despite realizing that my first sentence is often quite verbose, I found that this really reflects what my blog is all about and some of the greatest hits of 2014 made it in.

January: Happy 2014 everyone!! A new year is starting, so I thought I would talk about trends and about how the world in changing...

February: 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).

March: 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.

April: I now have one year of being a PI under my belt.

May: Your website is your labs' ambassador to the outside world.

June: When I was leaving my postdoc lab, my boss told me to be careful about my effort because when he started he did not pay much attention to it and soon he was stuck with no effort to give. In my head I was thinking "That's a nice problem to have, but that will definitely not happen to me".

July: Lovingly nicknamed the "kangaroo" grant by the NIH, the K99/R00 Transition to Independence award is designed to help postdoctoral fellows leap into a faculty position by supplying two years of mentored research time to obtain training to develop their independent project (K99) and supporting the newly independent investigator for 3 years (R00).

August: As my team grows I have been fretting not only about finding the best people, but finding the best people who are compatible with each other.

September: Wikipedia defines a pilgrimage as "a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to a person's beliefs" and I would add that in general you embark on a pilgrimage to ask for something or reach some kind of enlightenment.

October: A recent NYT article on women being criticized in workplace reminded me of the time I received a lecture on how not to be a bitch.

November: For the first time I am learning what it's like to be in the SfN host city and while everyone in the lab gets to go for cheap, the prep is not trivial.

December: I finally made it to the other side!

Life on an academic search committee

I finally made it to the other side! Not only I have a faculty position, but I get to be involved in picking other faculty since I'm now part of a search committee. I already had the sense that there were a lot of variables to be considered when finding a job, and now I'm even more certain of it. Bottom line, don't take it personally if you don't get an interview!

You have no idea what is going on in that room.  There are some great posts out there describing how a search committee gets to the short list (here and here) and why jobs sometimes disappear (here), so I don't need to rehash in detail that there is a huge amount of politics and that there are directives from the people who hold the purse strings. Unless you or your boss know someone at that institution who can tell you what current priorities, you will not know whether you are a good fit or not. Even if you have excellent publications, your very worthy application may be dropped because 1) you don't have the right expertise the group is looking for, or 2) you don't bring in enough money (or are likely to bring in money) or 3) it's badly organized and difficult to read.

While I used to be obsessed with helping people develop the perfect research statement, now I realize that there are other parts of the application which are as critical, simply because when you have >100 applications to read in a limited amount of time, you look for any kind of short-cut to get rid of 85-90% of them. As a newly minted assistant professor, I did my absolute best to develop a coherent spreadsheet and look at every single app with an open mind, because I still remember when I was applying. Be certain that more senior faculty has no time whatsoever to do this.

My strategy was the following.

1) I would look at the CV and look at the number and quality of first author publications, then look at the number of fellowships and grants. That got rid of around 70% of the applications. The fact that every CV looked different was a huge problem as you have to scroll up and down all the time to figure things out. If you want to make the life of people in the search committee easier I would recommend to a) make sure your CV is organized and readable; b) list the amount for each grant you have active/completed (Do not list $100-200 travel grants...those don't count. Put those in the Honors section.); c) number your publications and separate those accepted/in press and those in preparation, because padding your CV with 10 articles in preparation looks pretty bad and make this committee member annoyed.

2) Then I found myself gravitating to the cover letter more than the research statement. A really good cover letter giving a succinct and clear summary of your interests and a brief overview of your past accomplishments can actually do wonders to sway a search committee member. In my case it informed the decision of whether or not I was interested in reading the research statement or not.

3) I finally read the full application of the top 30 candidates based on my spreadsheet and narrowed it down to 10 as required by the chair, but also flagged another 10 which would be equally good. The applicants and committee members were from a variety of fields and there were some candidates who would not have been interesting to me, but could have been interesting to other people. For this reason, i.e. that search committee members can be from different departments, remember to make your research statement very simple and clearly understandable.

Since this was my first time, my primary objective through the meeting was to stay quiet because I really didn't want to make the faux pas to put someone down or to step into some interdepartmental infighting. There were very clear directives from the top, which gave us some guidelines, and luckily many of us agreed on several candidates, so that my 3-4 top people actually made it to the short list. It was a bit terrifying to see how easily someone's hopes and dreams could be cast aside, but the applicant pool was exceptional so many great candidates were left out. I know people don't want to hear this, but that is where a call from your boss to the right person or a friendly face in the committee can make all the difference, because literally all that is takes to get you in the shortlist is a strong advocate or just someone that knows you and can say you are good.