How do you keep your lab on track?

Dr. Yellow Shinkansen, Japan

It's merit-based salary increase time at my institution and before I left for vacation at the beginning of October I had a cram all my lab annual reviews into one day, so that I could complete the reviews and turn in the paperwork. Back to back annual reviews are exhausting, so I don't recommend you do it, but I do really like doing periodical official reviews of my lab members and they also really appreciate it. I have already discussed why I do annual reviews and some ideas on how to structure them here and here, so I'm not going to delve into that, apart from saying that reviews are really important to keep you lab on track, to keep in touch with what is going on in people's minds and to give them a chance to discuss their career plans.

While I was traveling I visited a friend who just sold a small biotech company she had started a few years ago with her husband and we talked a lot about her experience and how she built a lab for developing assays and cloning. In going from 1 to 15 people, one major thing to keep in mind was culture, as the people who had come in first were used to a lot of attention and felt "like family", and pretty soon the place became a business and some of the early people became upset. Defining your relationship with everyone at work so that there are no favorites and everyone feels valued so that they remain productive, is incredibly difficult.

One of her solutions was to have quarterly reviews, so that the "This is how you are doing"/"How are you?" discussion was given continuity throughout the year. With continuous reviews it was not a surprise to someone that their boss thinks they need to improve and will not give them a raise, since they have had multiple chances to discuss their performance and improve. Quarterly reviews were capped at 15 mins unless the employee thought they needed more time and needed to discuss something specific. In general academic lab scientists may be more motivated than biotech employees and not necessarily just see it as a job, but I have realized that in the weekly meetings I sometimes I get too worked up on the particular experiments that are being done and the next steps and forget to take a step back and make sure that the postdoc or student thinks of the project as a whole. So a "Where are we? How should we structure the paper?" meeting every few months may not be a bad idea in addition to a discussion on performance and career objectives. I have been more often in situation where people felt ignored than smothered and I have a tendency to be pretty hands off myself, so I am hoping that having frequent fixed checkpoints may hep me be more involved and the lab peeps feel that they know where they are going. Since our usual review is at the end of September, we will try January and May and see how it goes.

Picture by ませはるゆき (間瀬晴之＿撮影) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Step up or lean in or whatever. Finding your footing as a woman in academia.

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. We were coming back from a large group meeting where a female PI behaved very aggressively towards the speaker. By non-gender-biased standards she was very aggressive, but I was shocked at this senior male PI suddenly giving me "fatherly" advice that as a woman you don't want to be perceived as a harpy. Note: that particular woman was doing very well where she was and she moved to another place where she's doing even better.

I have to admit I had never given much thought about being a woman in science until recently and that I never felt hindered or discriminated for my gender in my career. Maybe because I never really worried about it and I have always spoken to men as equals. In my science high-school, in college and grad school I was always surrounded by brilliant and ambitious girls and women, and the highest achievers around me were consistently female. So it was kind of a given growing up that girls were smarter than boys.

Yet, as the years passed, some women continued their ascent in academia or in industry or even running their own company and some did not, and I started wondering why. A high-power industry or consulting job is as bad or worse than an academic position, so don't tell me that those women "dropped out", because they did not (see my thoughts on the science pipeline here). When I'm sitting at home watching TV and a girlfriend IMs me at 1am from the office, I feel like a slacker. The issue is not what you decide to do with your life, which is entirely up to you, but whether your environment is poised to support you in any decision that you'd like to make. I have grad school friends who never liked the lab and decided very quickly that running a lab was not for them, but I also have friends who were discouraged or "pushed out" and I think in the end, one of the determining factors in your success is the right mentoring and role models.

It took me a while to figure out what "He's not a good mentor for women" meant, until I saw how the wrong personality combination can destroy a promising career by generating complete lack of support, especially if you end up in a very large lab. In a fast paced and somewhat aggressive lab environment, in general you need to be self-sufficient and take charge of your own career right away and if you are at all tentative or open-ended in how you portray your research, you get in trouble. I had a friend whose project would change every 6 months because she would start incredibly awesome and innovative experiments and as it took time to set everything up, the boss would just say to drop it because it wasn't going anywhere. After four years, not much to show for it and a baby on the way, it made sense to look for a different job. Another friend, who is an exceptional scientist, was so beaten down by a bully PI who told her her work was crap, that she didn't care about research any more and started looking for random non-academia jobs, until she found a second temporary postdoc. A transitional position turned into five more years, a couple of great papers and a faculty position. The work that was once "crap" is consistently recommended by the PI in the previous lab as the best example of how to address that particular problem.

So how do you take a phenomenal scientific mind and turn it away from the thing they loved? You beat it senseless and make it feel worthless. And the criticism described in the NYT is one of the aspects of it. Do you have to make your skin thicker and learn how to take it? Maybe a little bit, but you can also just do your legwork and avoid it as much as you can by finding the right people to talk to. Of course I don't have all the answers, but I thought I'd jot down some ideas from the prospective of a trainee recently turned mentor.

1) Look for the right mentors. As a mentee you have to be active in building your mentoring team. It is absolutely possible that the guy who is considered your primary mentor, is not mentorly at all. But maybe you just really need him for the money and the prestige. As long as he's not creating problems, and he is signing any recommendation letter you put in front of him and paying for everything you need, that is a perfectly viable situation.  There is a lot of mentoring around you, ripe for the plucking.
- speak to senior postdocs in the lab or in other labs;
- schedule meetings with friendly faculty at your institution to pick their brains;
- join mentoring sessions at your society meeting;
- assemble a job search mentoring committee: the one for my K99 application was composed only of women, from an HHMI investigator to a brand new faculty, and it absolutely kicked ass in helping me through the process;
- ask people you meet at conferences "What is your advice for someone starting a postdoc? starting a lab?" If we didn't love hearing ourselves talk, we wouldn't be doing this job. If this spurs a really great chat, shoot them an email to thank them and ask them if you can keep in touch. They may be more than happy to comply.
A lot of us are academic scientists because we like mentoring people. You may already have an excellent mentor, but you cannot expect a single mentor to be good at everything, so you need a lot of them.

2) Don't be afraid of leadership and becoming a role model. I recently attended an informal get-together of women scientists, many of whom are in a horrible situation with a very misogynistic department chair. Everyone was profoundly unhappy, yet nobody wanted to take the lead and propose a solution. I had to restrain myself from doing my best Cher in Moonstruck impression "Snap out of it!" How do you get out of something if nobody is willing to do anything about it? I was just reading a great post from Dr. Isis on how the Association for Women in Science had to sue the NIH to get more women on study sections. They saw a wrong and they addressed it, and they made the NIH a better place substantially increasing access to women. At a forum on women scientists I attended this summer they said that the environment changes when women have at least 30% of leadership positions, but how do we get there? Women have to step up or lean in, as we say nowadays. As a senior postdoc, I took a fantastic Leadership course, offered by my institution and I think these should be available everywhere for women (and men) in academia. So,
- start a group at your university where you can discuss issues and how to address them (this could be open to men and women as long as it's inclusive);
- actively engage in mentoring of younger women: you can mentor undergrads as a grad student and so on and so forth;
- speak up nicely and politely to have your problems solved when they arise and engage the leadership;
- remind seminar committees to keep a 50-50 gender balance in your seminar series...and in your job searches;
- look for leadership courses offered by your scientific society or start one within your university (someone from the business school might be intrigued and help);
- there probably are quite a few misogynistic bastards around, but most men are likely just oblivious, so send them a handy guide like this one from Tenure She Wrote;
- raise well adjusted boys who will know how to cook a full meal and clean their room, and know how to do the laundry when their wife has a grant to write...or a company to run.

I don't know. Some days I'm more hopeful than others, but unless we step up as a group as mentors and role models, men are not necessarily going to do it for us.

Advice to prepare for your academic job search (in biomedical sciences)

I should be working on a grant, but I don't feel like it. So I am going to write something else.
This is the season when academic job postings are coming out by the dozen every day and in the past few weeks I have been having multiple discussions with friends and colleagues getting ready to apply. I have been reading proposals, having lengthy conversations about strategy, I joined my first search committee. Heck, I'm even working on putting together a seminar on the US job market for foreign postdocs. I thought I would share some of this advice with the world.

Dr. Becca has put together a wonderful aggregator post with job search advice from the blogosphere. There is tons of stuff for you to peruse on all the aspects of the search. When I interviewed I also used Karen Kelsky's site and blog The Professor is In for a lot of wonderful advice. What I want to do here is bring up a few things I think are critical that are sometimes overlooked and that could give you an edge.

The overall strategy
1) Planning takes years. This is going to upset some people, but I went to a "postdoc strategy" seminar in my first year, that basically said "You have to plan your path to your faculty job from the very beginning of your postdoc". You work your way from fellowships to larger NIH K grants, you maintain a steady level of paper productivity, balancing safer projects with the large blockbuster idea. If you are the person who is in their 7-9th year of their postdoc without a personal grant and with only one paper, no matter how large and glamorous, your path will be uphill. A CNS (Cell, Nature, Science) paper may be necessary in some places, but it is not sufficient. A steady stream of good publications and funding in this horrible climate and a promise of a well-thought out, exciting and fundable research program can do the trick. When you are ready (or even the year before) check out sites collecting job postings in your field, like Neurorumblr for neuroscience.
2) The network is your friend. Unless you are the one with the super hot paper/technique who will get 15/20 interviews, you must use your network. You (or your postdoc/PhD advisor) could start reaching out to people you know in institutions of interest:"Do you have a search?" "What are you looking for?""Oh, too bad you don't have a search, are you still interested in hiring people?" You work your network and your friend's network to get the application looked at. Don't worry about your status, as a postdoc I successfully sent a emails to people I knew on behalf of friends saying "Hey, my friend is applying to your search. She's absolutely awesome, you should check out her application". If you know someone well at the target institution, even if they are not on the search committee, a nicely phrased email or call can lift the applicant from the rest of the pile. Of course, the application has to be good, but humans tend to prefer a known entity to an unknown entity, so the endorsement of a respected friend can be the tie-breaker.
3) Be realistic about your options. If you have geographical restrictions or a two-body problem, it will be harder to get the job you want, but not impossible. You just have to plan, and use your network, and probably go on the market for 2-3 years in a row. Or reconsider, hopefully not your spouse, but your geographical location. Just discuss your strategy with as many people as you can and don't get flustered. Getting a job is difficult, getting a job in the city you want is more difficult, getting two jobs in the city you want is almost superhuman. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but it's always good to have a plan B.
4) The wait sucks. After the full time job of sending out applications is done, you will experience a state of permanent anxiety and self-doubt. The wait between the last application and the first interview email is horrible!! Everyone feels horrible and it's okay. It's not just you. If you want to feel really bad you can Google every institution you applied to to find out who's being interviewed...

The application
1) Your research statement must show 5-10 years of exciting, fundable research.  DO NOT propose more detailed analysis stemming from your CNS paper, instead propose a groundbreaking new direction your paper inspired. DO NOT propose to make 1,000 mouse lines to show you are ambitious. I saw this at an actual job talk and could feel the hair rising on the neck of the search committee..."Do you know what a "per diem" is?"
Some of the really big places want their applicants to have the potential to revolutionize the thinking in their fields (and that is an actual tenure criteria). But even there, you have to develop a well thought-out plan with safer and riskier projects to continue the balance of funding and publication. You might be a revolutionary, but the revolution must be funded.
2) Give your research statement to read to AS MANY PEOPLE as you can. Email your grad school friends, email faculty you know around the country, especially, email people who have been on search committees, and ask everyone if they would have the time to read your statement. If someone is or has been on a search committee you should ask whether your proposal is at the level of those picked for interviews at their institution. This way you will collect an incredible array of comments that you will have to collate. Everyone will see something different and you will figure out all the places where your proposal is unclear for the average scientist. Psycgirl recently wrote an awesome post about what happens on a search committee. You don't know who all these people are, nor what their expertise is, and they may be reading your application at 2am buzzing on caffeine. Clarity is really really important to convey how exciting your work is.

The talk
1) Simplify and be clear. My postdoctoral advisor was a master at giving talks and one of his most important roles in the lab was whipping talks into shape. The rule is "This is what I am going to tell you. Now I'm telling you this. This is what I just told you". Choose 1-2 good representative projects leading to your preliminary data for your future directions and make sure EVERYONE can understand them. Big picture, some detail, big picture. Do not overload people with data, just focus on telling a good story. The mantra is "A good story makes the listener feel smart, which makes you look very smart!"
2) Practice your talk with AS MANY PEOPLE as you can. As for the research statement, don't be bashful. The first time you give the talk, it's going to feel like a terrible beating. Your ego is going to be down the drain and probably you will cry. Make sure you still have a couple of weeks before your interview. Then take the advice and do it again and again. Find out where it's unclear, where the difficult transitions are, and make sure that EVERYONE can understand what you do and what you want to do.
3) No matter how many interviews you have, be humble. Have you ever heard of that guy with >10 interviews and not a single job offer? Well, I have. Don't get cocky. It can happen. It's always good to be gracious and a little intimidated, and to do your best in every single interview.

For the interview itself, I don't have much to add. All the usuals: be comfortable, test run your shoes, bring chocolate/energy bars in your bag and sneak to the bathroom to eat when your blood sugar levels drop. The one thing I really liked was having my talk on my iPad. Though I think that giving the talk from the iPad is douchy, so I used my laptop for that, I carried my iPad with my job talk on Slideshark at the individual meetings. Before my talk or with people who had missed it, I could just show some of the data on the spot and it really helped with the conversations.

There you go, little birds! Time to fly!!

The NIH site-visit: a scientific pilgrimage

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. So it's only fitting that a visit to the NIH to the extramural program of your choosing will resemble a pilgrimage of sorts. Many senior people I know, pilgrims before me, have extolled the importance of this trip on the true path to an R01, multiple R01s or even the elusive P01. So there I went, and back again. It was an incredibly useful experience.

The approach: Some program officers are more helpful than others, but in general most POs I know really want to talk to you about your science. As stated in the bible of federal grant writing, How the NIH Can Help You Get Funded, once you become one of "their grantees" they have developed an investment in your career, and if they believe in your research then it's a critical relationship to nurture. Senior people always say that in the past a good PO could really help develop a scientific career, now with the paylines the way they are, they are probably more frustrated than anything, but most of them still want to help, and they may also help you find other institutes to target if their pockets are too shallow. So, email them and keep them in the loop. If you are a K99/R00 grantee planning to transition to an R01 or an early career investigator looking for your first grant, you should just email them and say that you would like to talk about options. Once you have developed a relationship, I know a lot of people who travel to Bethesda on purpose once a year to talk to POs, so it's not strange to inquire about their schedules and come to talk in person. Of course it's easier to just stop by if you are invited to serve on a study section or are attending the same conference, so if you know they go to meetings you can always shoot them an email "Are you going to XYX?". Remember that your PO may be busy, so if they don't reply it's fine to wait an appropriate amount of time (like a week or two) and try again.

The preparation: If you go to the NIH or meet your PO elsewhere, you should always be prepared. The PO may ask you for a draft specific aims page and if they don't, you should prepare it nonetheless and send it beforehand.  It may not be your best work if you are way in advance before the desired submission date, but it will really help you crystallize your thoughts and will provide a showcase for what you are doing/planning to do. Also, come up with any question you may have about administrative changes in your current grant (budget, effort, supplements, etc), applying for funding for your trainees, whether they know another PO you would like to talk to/try another institute, etc. Try and maximize the time you have with them: prepare well and don't waste your/their time.

The meeting: They may want to put things in prospective, so be prepared to start with your elevator pitch about your lab: what is your overarching question, where you are going and where the grant/project you are talking about fits in the lab. It will help them understand what is going on, but it will also give them confidence that you have covered all the bases and have allocated resources appropriately. Then you can just chat about your specific aim draft and expand on your preliminary data and on alternative grant structures. I find their questions really interesting, because I think they have this birds eye view of what gets funded and by just asking "Are you going to do this?", you start wondering whether that's what you should do...Also when you give them the outline of a hypothesis and a proposal, they can usually tell you very quickly whether it fits in their portfolio or not, and whether you should contact someone else in their institute or another institute.
One thing my PO told me is never to go in for an R01 in the parent call for applications without having a home for it, i.e. an institute and a PO. It's just too risky a gamble, and it's really nice to see a friendly name when it shows up in eRACommons in the right place. It still needs to be good and to get excellent reviews, but at least your precious grant is not lost somewhere all by itself. By doing your homework, you have insured that at least you are proposing something that is in line with the funding priorities, which will increase your chances if your score is borderline.

Despite initially being a little intimidated, I always found my interactions with the NIH and its officials to be very positive and most importantly useful for understanding how the system works. While I'm not sure barging into someone's office would work well, if you don't know them, eventually developing cordial professional relationships with POs could be really important for new investigators. So don't be scared, they are very nice and many of them used to be just like you years ago, so they get what you are going through.

Labor day sale! Shopping for job interviews or the new semester.

I have read several posts on how a new female faculty should dress (good ones here, here and here), but since I come from a European country known for its fashion sense and for years I have been the designated shopping companion for job interviews and other major events, I thought I'd add my 2 cents to the mix. Guys whose eyes are rolling at this point, just stop reading. I'll have a gender neutral post next. If you are interested in advice for males there's a great follow-up post from Jake at How to Write a K99 blog. Bargain hunting is my favorite competitive sport, so I'll share some tricks and ideas for the ladies.

I will preface this with a general suggestion: balance being aware of your surroundings and showing who you are. You have to look professional and be appropriate, but the level at which you dress up or down should be within 1-2 standard deviations of the people around you. Yet don't be afraid of your identity. One of my best friends is a petite geologist who wears combat boots and cargo pants on surveys, but can rock stilettos and a hard hat on construction sites...Another friend is an academic who is sporty and outdoorsy. She has a very definite style, but when we'd go out shoe shopping and she tried on the pointy heels I like, they would look so uncomfortable and out of place on her. Suffice it to say she wore colored Camper shoes under her gown on her wedding day and she looked absolutely stunning. You are who you are and you have to own it.

The job search look
One piece of advice I received years ago at a job search advice seminar, was to go to interviews wearing at least one item which was distinctive, be it a scarf, a piece of jewelry or something with an interesting cut. The trick was to not overdo it, but be memorable and unique, which is easier said than done. Your talk and the way you interact with others are always going to be more important factors, but projecting professionalism and a sense of identity never hurts. I know that some people will talk about what you were wearing after you are gone.
My thing for my interview season was muted but strong colors, sometimes patterned, in tones of either petrol or oxblood, which work well with my coloring. Petrol is nice and calming and oxblood is softly energetic. I quite often wear fire-engine red, but unless you're campaigning for office, it may not be a good idea on the interview trail. I never wear jackets, but I also bought a couple of grey/beige blazers that fit nicely...and never wore them again. Shoes had a little bit of heel, but had to be comfortable enough that I could stand and give a talk for an hour AND if necessary walk 20 minutes to a restaurant if the guys taking me out for dinner wanted to take a walk and had no concept that my heels could be hurting. The most important thing is that the clothes are comfortable and make you feel good. No snags, tightness, loose necklines which could accidentally become revealing. Break new shoes in and invest in insoles or padding (my favorites are Foot Petals, which you can sometimes find discounted by the cashier at DSW). You can also use transparent surgical tape to protect your feet wherever you may get a blister.
Just in time for interviews, the Saks Consolidation Sale will have great designer outfits at 70-80% off at the beginning of January. Their sales people are often really good at helping you put things together, and will work with you to retrieve items from other stores or get tailoring done. I know it's not an American thing, but Tim Gunn is right when he recommends to have things tailored, especially dresses. If you are busty, get a larger size and have it taken in. If a dress you like is marked down from $500 to $100 but only exists in a larger size, $50 worth of alterations can make you feel like a million bucks. Hemming pants to the right length to hit your heel will cost $10 at your dry cleaner. See recommendations here on how to pick garments that can be easily altered.
On interview day, when you have the jitters and are desperate to make a good impression, the last think you want is look in the mirror of your hotel room and become self-conscious. It doesn't matter what size you are. Good tailoring, that hits in all the right places and fits like a glove, will help your confidence. Especially if you are not a average height size 6-8 C cup, since most off the rack clothes will not be cut for you.
My petite geologist friends had a mom who could sew well and she could point to anything in a magazine and say "Make me this" and her mom would make it. Most of us are not that lucky and if you are smaller, taller or curvier than "average", the fashion industry becomes trickier to navigate. The thing is that with a lot of different types of women buying clothes, there are brands and cuts out there just for you and when there aren't, there are still good seamstresses and tailors.

The "professor look"
As a new faculty, you will probably have more disposable income, but even as a postdoc there are a lot of deals to be had. Business attire advice always says that you have to dress for the job you want, but you don't need to break the bank doing it.
If you like suits, go for it, but as you go in and out of meetings and classes and try to still do experiments, blazers may be uncomfortable (as you have probably figured out by now, I hate blazers). Two really good pieces to pull together a jean/slack and tank top look are the DKNY cozy and the J Crew Jackie cardigan, both coming in a huge array of neutral and bright colors.

DKNY cozy styles

Cozies are wonderful because you can tie them differently every day and you can adapt the style to your shape. Forget the $195 price tag and pick some up at any DKNY outlet store, especially when end of season colors go on sale for $30-40, like this weekend. They come in P-S and M-L size and that's all you have to worry about. The cozy ring which looks like a big belt buckle is awesome to get some of the more complex ties to look put together.

The Jackie cardigan is a proper name for a little 3/4 sleeve cardi with pearly buttons which Jackie O might have worn. Its cheaper sibling the Clare cardigan is now on the sale at the J Crew Factory site for $24.50 in 14 different colors. It lasts a season of washes and then starts to look a bit faded, but it's an amazing deal at $25.

Despite all the advice to the contrary, my big thing since getting my faculty job have been costume necklaces in different colored resins that match or complement the sweaters which are usually in bright candy colors. Senior female faculty in my department is big on jewelry, so I have experimented a lot. Flash sale places like RueLaLa or ideeli have really cool designers like Amrita Singh and Sparkling Sage in the rotation and surprisingly Overstock.com has a huge array of jewelry from all over the world. I call this my "professorial necklace" collection. Nothing steps up a look like properly chosen accessories.

In a way you can see the interview outfit shopping as your trial to assemble your faculty wardrobe. With comfort and personal style in mind you may try new designers and buy go-to pieces for your first talks and conferences. Since we are all crazy busy and don't have much time to keep track of stuff ShopItToMe is a great resource: you tag what you like and you get an email when the price drops. Pinterest will also do that, if you make a board with different pieces. For example see Dr. Mellivora's board for new faculty attire.

I think that muting your femininity and your identity to fit in a boys' club sounds like an absolutely ridiculous concept. So, if you like to shop, shop away, ladies! 

Live Tweeting SFN2014 vs data protection

There has been a lot of chatter last night and today on Twitter about the SfN2014 embargo policy to hold communications about presentation until the end and it got me thinking about what the SfN meeting is for, since I'm dealing with issues of identity this week.

I'll start from the fact that I don't live tweet because I find it distracting and I like to listen and take notes, but if someone live tweeted one of my talks I would be fine with it, so I have nothing against live tweeting. As far as tweeting in general I just went to a conference where I tweeted about cool talks and posters I saw and to one that was completely embargoed (top to bottom) where as instructed I didn't tweet.

The first was the European neuroscience meeting FENS which is similar to SfN: large, with tons of posters, with large plenary/presidential lectures and whatnot. The second was a subfield Gordon Research Conference for 200 people where almost everyone apart from the paranoid usual suspects presented completely unpublished work. At FENS I presented a story that was already accepted and coming out within 2 weeks, at the GRC I presented a whole bunch of brand new unpublished data. At SfN we will present a story which will hopefully be submitted before the meeting. Why? Because SfN is too big and scary and most people, like at FENS, only present accepted or ready to go data. I would be happy if someone tweeted about my SfN poster, but I wouldn't have been fine if someone had tweeted about my GRC poster.

So the issue is "What are the large society meetings for?". I would not necessarily send a postdoc to SfN with the intent to learn about our field, I would (and I did) send them to a smaller meeting where they can meet people and see what is happening at the cutting edge. I would instead send an undergraduate or grad student to the SfN meeting to learn about the breadth of neuroscience and see what lots of people are doing. SfN is also great for networking and looking for all kinds of jobs. I go to SfN myself every few years to catch up with friends and get a general feel of what people have been interested in and what trends are emerging. With 30,000 people symposia are mostly impossible to attend and posters absolutely insane, so after I have seen the greatly curated posters in my itinerary I just stroll down the A-D lanes and pick up key words.

And that's the conundrum, you can live tweet presidential lectures all you want, but in reality you just need to say "PubMed Prof. X about Y" and there's the content of the talk. You can also live tweet the posters, but what that is going to do is that people will make sure not to put any critical new data in it unless the paper is in the can. That is still very useful, because the audience will know in advance what are the cool things coming out. You just have to realize that with an abstract submission deadline 6 months in advance you are really seeing last year's data.

As a hybrid between a geneticist ("Do not say a word. They could scoop us tomorrow.") and a cell biologist ("Don't worry. It'll take them 2 years to catch up.") I understand both feelings, but I really appreciate sharing. I think that science will move much faster if we share openly and distribute credit appropriately and I've been doing my best to push geneticists terrorized by the advent of next-generation sequencing into doing so. Yet scientists always have a little bit of Gollum in them ("My preciousss data"), so the question behind all this is not really whether you can live tweet SfN, which you can, who's really going to stop you? There is really no reason to get that incensed. SfN is last year's data, what should we do about today's data? Are you ready to put what you have out there right now?

Who am I? Defining your identity on the tenure-track.

"Who am I?" is the question I have been pondering in the past few days after attending a conference I have attended religiously for the past 10 years.  Since it's a small subfield conference, I know basically everyone there and people come back every 2 years over and over again. Old friends attending for the first time wondered why they didn't know about it and vouched to become regulars. It's is my version of summer camp. Awesome science camp!

Yet, this time I felt like I don't belong any more. The work I presented just didn't fit. Maybe it didn't fit because this year's slant was skewed towards the conference organizers' interests, but this feeling of suddenly being in the wrong place raised some questions I've been struggling with: my identity. A piece of advice I received when I was interviewing for jobs was to develop a strong identity, an identity that could be summarized in a few words. Having an imaginary moniker like "Embryonic Stem Cell Boy" or "Endosomal Signaling Girl" makes it easier for colleagues to pick you for symposia and seminars. And it will make it easier for people in your field to know what your impact is when they write letters for tenure. As a new investigator on the tenure-track I need to define who I am, strongly assert my independence from my postdoctoral mentor and make myself known. Regional, national, international reputation! What do I want to be known for?

The conundrum comes with having two lines of research in the lab. I had two lines of research during my PhD and during my postdoc. Both my postdoctoral projects came with me. They were funded during my postdoc and they got funded now. I was talking about my work with an NIH Program Officer at the meeting indicating that I want to apply for two R01s and he laughed "Blessed youth!" Then I talked to some of the medium-level investigators and I got conflicting advice: some say "FOCUS! Put everyone on one paper at once!", others said "Be dispersive! Follow the biology wherever it takes you! Have fun!" I think this is maybe the hardest decision I have to make as a new PI. Part of me is scared that remaining split will doom my lab, but part of me wants to ride this wild funding wave to the end. If both projects stay funded and productive, each with its own independent animal model, why not continue and instead devise a new umbrella identity for myself? At the end that would be the same umbrella identity that got my the job in the first place. I get really really bored doing the same thing and having multiple lines of inquiry keeps me interested and motivated...and now I can focus my people without having to focus myself. During my first year I have never written the same grant twice and I am really encouraged by bloggers like DrugMonkey who recommend to diversify your grant portfolio. Among all this, the project that I really want to do is yet another one, which is going to take more than 5 years to come to fruition, and which will never get funded if not by my start-up money.

Mind, it's not that I am doing diametrically different things. A neuron is always a neuron and my interest in development is focused on some specific events, but the mechanisms of interest are different, the animal models vary, so that sometimes I'm jumping between different approaches and ways of thinking. Is the balancing act worth it? Will I come out of this with a more interesting and competitive research program?

I know the detail is scant, but thought and advice would be greatly appreciated.

BTW, hope the YouTube sharing is kosher because there is nothing that helps an identity crisis as much as Hugh Jackman....

Learning how to hire #5: is team building a science?

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. I stumbled on a 2-year old Harvard Business Review article discussing the science of building a productive team and I thought "Science? I can do that!"

By assigning devices recording daily employee activities scientists discovered that communication across all team members is one of the most important factors for team productivity, as it is finding people with the right qualities to join the team. Team members must communicate with each other and with management often, the more they communicate outside of formal meetings and the more they "gel" with each other, the better performance gets. I love sitting in my office and hearing them chit-chat and laugh out there, because it means they are happy and they are comfortable in the lab...and if they are comfortable in the lab, in the lab they stay as long as they need to. Also if they are comfortable with each other, it is easier to ask for help and to collaborate. With a really small lab and no lunch room on the floor, we have all been having lunch in my office which is often a chance to just talk about random things. As the lab gets bigger, it will become more difficult to fit everyone in there, so I'll need to figure something out to make sure the new people are included in the group.

The HR Council in Canada has a great page with suggestions for building a productive team from how to develop a team to understanding group dynamics in order to defuse problems. My main concern at the moment is to find people who will get along. I am assembling two small teams for two projects and based on team-work experiences from previous labs I want to make sure things run smoothly: personalities have to fit and roles have to be well defined, so that conflicts can be resolved when they arise. Because conflict will come one way or another and the worst possible thing it to ignore it and let it sit there and fester. One of the best suggestions of this Forbes article on how leaders can deal with conflict is to view conflict as an opportunity for team building and for innovation. I had never thought about the possibility of leveraging conflict, but it totally makes sense and makes it sound less scary.

Usual HR advice is not to hire yourself and not to base hiring on personality, but qualifications for the job. While I do agree with the not hiring yourself over and over again because variety in the work place is actually quite nice, I do think personality if very important and I think that it should be matched to the project at hand. There are experiments that can accommodate a mercurial and innovative mind and there are others that require a careful and methodical approach. I have funding for both, and I think that finding people who will naturally gravitate towards one or the other may be more productive than trying to push someone who likes diversity on a repetitive task.

As the lab grows in the next two months I'll have my work cut out for me.
For more "Learning how to hire" posts and other management tips, go to my Management page.

Image credit: Working Together Teamwork Puzzle Concept, lumaxart, Wikimedia Commons

Where does the science pipeline go? My pipeline

I've done some thinking about the science pipeline this week: a thought-provoking blog post by Sergey Kryazhimskiy (@skryazhi) asked whether it is moral to hire postdocs with the assumption that they will get a faculty position, and meanwhile I've been organizing an event for the summer students to talk about STEM careers this Friday.

In just 8 years from my PhD I found that the pipeline leads to many places and that students and postdocs should be aware of where it can go. My graduate program now has a semester long class about what you can do with a PhD and I participated in the postdoc session for several years. It is not moral to train someone with the assumption that there will be job in academia and nothing else in their future, because that is not the case. On the other hand, there are tons of other things to do and in the vast majority of cases my friends decided in the middle of their postdocs that they wanted to do something else. I thought I'd list all the things my peeps from grad school (+/- 4 years from me) are doing and it would be cool if other people did it too. I am interested in seeing people's trajectories and I have listed job changes whenever they happened and whether they did a postdoc or not before their non-academic job. I also thought I'd write down when they had their kids.

Graduation (gender): trajectory
Academic jobs in blue, non-academic STEM in purple

n/a (M): MA dropped out > dancer > innovation consultant for healthcare
n/a (F): MA dropped out > science documentary producer

2002 (M): MD/PhD fellowship (1 kid) > assistant (2 kids) > associate professor @ Ivy institution
2002 (M): MD/PhD fancy postdoc (2 kids) > assistant professor @ R1 institution
By "fancy" I mean with a really famous PI at a very high profile institution
2002 (M): MD/PhD fancy postdoc K08 (2 kids) > assistant professor @ R1 institution
2002 (F): PhD fancy postdoc > assistant professor @ Ivy institution (1 kid)
2002 (M): PhD postdoc > startup software company (2 kids)
2002 (F): PhD fancy postdoc > big pharma

2003 (M): MD/PhD fancy postdoc K99 > assistant professor @ Ivy institution (1 kid)
2003 (F): PhD fancy postdoc > assistant professor @ Ivy institution (1 kid)

2004 (F): PhD fancy postdoc (1 kid) > group leader in the UK
2004 (F): PhD fancy postdoc (2 kids) > assistant professor @ liberal arts college
2004 (F): PhD fancy postdoc (1 kid) > biology teacher in fancy boarding school
2004 (F): PhD no postdoc (2 kids) > JD > intellectual property lawyer > university IP office
2004 (F): PhD no postdoc > healthcare consulting/writing (2 kids)

2005 (F): PhD fancy postdoc K99 > assistant professor @ R1 institution (1 kid)
2005 (M): PhD fancy postdoc (2 kids) > assistant professor @ R1 institution
2005 (F): PhD postdoc > big pharma (1 kid)
2005 (F): PhD postdoc > healthcare advertising > big pharma marketing in Switzerland
2005 (F): PhD no postdoc > healthcare advertising (2 kids) > freelance copywriter

2006 (M): PhD fancy postdoc > lab head @ fancy research institute
2006 (M): PhD postdoc > assistant professor @ liberal arts college
2006 (F): PhD fancy postdoc K99 > assistant professor @ R1 institution (YOURS TRULY!)
2006 (F): PhD postdoc (1 kid) > staff scientist in the UK
2006 (M): PhD industry postdoc > small pharma > big pharma
2006 (M): PhD no postdoc > technology ventures office MBA
2006 (F): PhD no postdoc > technology ventures office (1 kid) > startup company (2 kids) > sold company, consulting
2006 (M): PhD no postdoc > consulting

2007 (F): PhD fancy postdoc K99 (2 kids) > assistant professor @ Ivy institution
2007 (F): PhD no postdoc > consulting
2007 (F): PhD no postdoc > Journalism MA > science writer
2007 (F): PhD no postdoc > consulting > healthcare strategy (1 kid)
2007 (M): PhD postdoc > small pharma > healthcare advertising

2008 (F): PhD no postdoc > big pharma in Switzerland (2 kids)
2008 (F): PhD no postdoc > technology ventures office MBA
2008 (M): PhD fancy postdoc (1 kid) > biotech sales
2008 2M-1F still in postdoc

2009 (F): PhD postdoc > science writing
2009 (F): PhD no postdoc > science policy
2009 2M-2F still in postdoc

So, of 45 grad school people I have kept in touch with 33% (n=15) are in faculty positions, 16% (n=7) are still postdocs and the other 51% are doing something else. The 33% surprised me because I thought the number would be much smaller, but I have not included all the postdocs I have met during grad school who have gone to do something else. Also, there are loads of MD/PhDs who have probably gone back to being physicians, who will bring this number down. In any case this supports the old adage "If you get an Ivy league education and do a fancy postdoc, you are more likely to get a job". Which was an actual piece of advice given to me when I was looking for grad schools.

In this non scientific approach I am also skewed towards females because 1) our program was mostly female and 2) girls tend to keep in touch more than boys. The variety is staggering with fluxes across different careers and across scientific disciplines. I have peeps in most major pharma companies in the US and Europe, and there is a lot of writing and consulting and advertising, plus some finance sprinkled in for good measure. Yet, this is all still STEM related. I think it's important to consider all these outcomes and to know what we are training people for. 

Life on the tenure-track: learn to push through the wall

If you have never read “Stress in biomedical research: six impossible things”, you should read it right now. Not kidding. Go read it, because it’s much more useful than anything I will say below.

I have written recently on work ethics and while on vacation last week I have been thinking about dealing with stress. The first year of running a lab was stressful, but there had been many other stressful times before that helped me figure out how to handle it. The Fall of 2010, when this opinion piece by Doug Green at St. Jude came out, was a particularly bad one. I was a postdoc coming off directing the first year of a summer research program for undergrads I started, two big grants applications, including the resubmission of my K99, finishing a paper. I was at a breaking point. I had a deadline every two weeks for 3 months and as the cherry on top I had agreed to write a review with my postdoctoral advisor due in mid-November. It was a tricky one because it was a short Current Opinions piece and I had a very ambitious plan: it had to cover my advisor’s bread and butter, cover MY bread and butter so that I could use it in the future, and everything had to be elegantly explained and put together while giving illuminating ideas to my field. It wasn’t happening. I cannot write at home so I was in the lab at 1 AM the day of the deadline and I just put my head down on my desk: “I’m going to email him right now and tell him I cannot do this! I just can’t. He’ll have to write this himself.” I had just pulled a muscle in my back writing. Did you even know you could be so tense that you pull a muscle while sitting?

One of the grad students was there and she took me to the lunch-room for tea. “Just take a break from it for a few minutes” she said. We chatted, while I kept running combinations in my head, and then it clicked: the right way to make it flow. By 3 AM the review was done and emailed off to my boss. It gets cited all the time. I was awarded both grants, and the summer program is now in its fifth year and thriving even after I left. Though very hard, the Fall of 2010 was one of the most definitive times in my career. It is when I became a PI in my head, a year before I applied for faculty positions.

The moral of this fable is Impossible Thing #5 from Doug Green’s paper: Be an Athlete. You train, you focus and when you hit the wall, you learn to push through. As it happened I didn’t know I had powered through a wall, but when I read his article soon thereafter, it all made sense. The problem was: How was I going to do it again? The following spring possibly because of these events or the ubiquitousness of the CouchTo5K app, I started running for the first time since college and training for races. I’m still a 5 to 10K runner, but even the transition from running 0 to 6 miles was an eye opener. You have to know your body and you have to listen. There are times when the roadblocks are all in your head and there are times when you absolutely have to rest for a couple of days, so that you don’t get injured. And then there are times when you just fly! The feeling of getting stronger and faster on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis, is pretty awesome, as is the knowledge of your inner resources and limits. If this concept doesn’t help during the madness of your tenure-track years, I don’t know what would.

I am not saying that you have to start running, though it seems a pretty constant advice on the TT blogosphere that to keep sane you have to find time to exercise any way your like. I'm saying that building an academic career seems like a marathon, not a sprint, and developing a mental approach to cope is more important than anything else. I felt that I could handle Year 1 because I had somewhat "trained" for it and that the lessons learned in Year 1 will hopefully help me handle whatever will come along in the future. I truly believe that what I learned as a runner (and a yogi) has been critical and shaping my mental attitude at work. It becomes second nature to check with your body, to push it and to nurse it. Some days are bad, so you just acknowledge it and move on. You have to forgive yourself and work to build on your talents over the long term. You prepare, you perform, you rest, you repeat over and over again while setting always bigger goals. At any given time, there may always be someone who is better than you, but you focus on your personal best constantly getting better. You celebrate the improvements and learn from the failures. Will this really make a difference in the long run? What do I know? I'm just a year into this, but it's definitely making a difference for me. Yet, I have not mastered much of what I am preaching, I'm still training.

There has been some talk on Twitter of what your manifesto is. So in a way my manifesto is this: to never stop training to better myself as a person and as a scientist, and to learn how to balance challenging and nurturing to avoid reaching a breaking point. Now how do you work this into my IDP?

FENS symposium on women in science

My blog has had an empty post labeled “Women in science” for a very long time, but as I collected ideas and links, I was never sure how to fill it and what to say that would be new on the subject. I always teeter between “We need to do something about this!” and “Stop complaining, already!”, so it was actually great to be at the Women in Neuroscience networking social at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) meeting in Milan on July 6^th. Both reactions were validated.

Having attended half a dozen of these events at various American conferences throughout the years, I was shocked to hear that this was the first time FENS dedicated symposium to its female members, but after all it is the first time the federation has a female president. FENS president Marian Joels together with Society for Neuroscience (SfN) president Carol Mason just wrote a wonderful opinion piece about women in science in Neuron. At the symposium the two presidents presented statistics from Europe and the US showing how gender equality still lags behind in the STEM subjects: women represent 41% of PhD students in the US and 46% in the EU, but females are only a fraction of the full professor cohort (28% in the US, 20% in the EU). Joels remarked that in very liberal Netherlands, where she works, only 13% of academics are female. Female department chairs are even scarcer: 10% in the US and 15% in the EU. The only beacon of equality is Norway, where 31% of department chair are female because of a goal of a 40% quote imposed by the government. At the current rate it will take the rest of Europe until 2050 to get to similar numbers…

Talking about quotas always makes people uncomfortable, but Joels indicated that 30% seems to be the tipping point to change the culture in the workplace and that it would indeed make a difference to get things started. Both societies strive to achieve gender balance in presentations. SfN will have 50/50 plenary lecturers this year in Washington, DC, and FENS had 42% in Milan. FENS also forbade single gender symposia. Half of FENS participants are female, but in the past up to 90% of speakers have been male. Both Mason and Joels advocated the creation of a formal list of female speakers at all stages of their career, similar to Anne’s list (a resource created by Anne Churchland to increase gender balance in neuroscience meetings).

SfN has also created multiple resources for women and gender equality, from recognizing gender bias to training for department chairs that can be found here.

The need for mentoring at all levels and for the creating of peer groups was stressed by everyone and mentoring was discussed by Martha Davila-Garcia an associate professor at Howard University and a representative of Women in World Neuroscience at the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). WWN is focused on mentoring especially in developing countries and has hosted "mentoring circles" at numerous neuroscience conferences. Dr. Davila-Garcia gave a great summary of what you must do to be a good mentor and a good mentee. I have already stressed how important mentoring is in general (here), but it is particularly crucial for women to have multiple supporters and role models (male and female).

Finally, Ilona Obara, a lecturer at Durham University, and Sarah Nickolls, an expert scientist at Neusentis Pfizer, described their career path in academia and industry respectively: balancing career and families, sometimes compromising with their husbands on what to do next. Dr. Obara concluded her talk with suggestions for starting academics: 1) negotiate your startup and salary as much as you can; 2) build allies in your department and outside; 3) learn to prioritize tasks and know that you will never get to the bottom of the pile. Dr. Nickolls did the same for industry: 1) take opportunities as they are offered to you since you may regret it later; 2) develop transferable skills that can be used in any drug development project so that you can change therapeutic area; 3) be change agile, i.e. be ready to lose your job or look for opportunities elsewhere.

The general idea of the meeting was: "Let's identify the problems to tackle and come up with solutions together!"