Musings about work ethics and unstructured schedules

After a very though year, I decided to take it easy this summer, which got me thinking about work
ethics and the kind of role model I want to be for the lab. One of my goals as a Principal Investigator (PI) and manager is to promote a work environment where people can be productive and happy. It is a very tall order and after 18 years doing research in different labs and institutions my thinking on what is an appropriate work load for a scientist continues to evolve.

I have been in places that were so stressful you would find people break down and cry in the women's bathroom every afternoon; and I have been in places where nobody cared about your progress but yourself. I have been thinking for a long time about what makes people productive. I remember one night in grad school (around the time the infamous Mu-Ming Poo letter on work ethics was leaked), when a new PI came up to our lab at 8pm and asked us: "Why are you here? Your boss left at 4. Why can't I get my people to stay longer on their own?" We were kind of clueless...all we could tell him was that we were there because we had work to do. Whether our boss was there or not, it did not matter.

At the same time, the 12-14 hour workdays in grad school were only productive to a certain extent. I had friends who took lots of vacations and still managed to publish great papers, and I sometimes felt that working too hard was more counterproductive than anything. The exhaustion and the emotional drain would actually cloud my thinking. A post-doc friend down the hall blew me away with his philosophy (imagine an Australian accent): "You know, I only stay late when everything is working well. If something is not working, I just leave, even if it's 3pm, and come back the next day with a fresh mind". Ha, such a hedonistic concept, mate. But could he be right in some way?

I think at the end it depends on what motivates you and on the structure you want in your life. The beauty of lab-life is that it's flexible. As the single mother of a self-sufficient feline, I have no constraints on my time, but friends and colleagues with kids have come up with a multitude of strategies. My postdoc lab was a great place to have a baby, since my boss was incredibly supportive of family time. Some people would work very hard from 8am to 4pm, others would work 10 to 5 and come back at midnight once the little ones had gone to bed. The only pressure you had most of the time was the one you put on yourself and they all managed to be productive. I like that approach.

Last year I discussed my desire for making the lab a Result Only Work Environment, a place where schedules are self-regulated and where all that counts is producing results to meet specific deadlines. I clearly tell my people that they can come and leave when they want, as long as they get their work done and they let me know if they are not going to be around during work hours. Some senior investigators have warned me that I could get into trouble by letting technical staff dictate their hours, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. So far, I am the only lab on the floor where people are still there at 8pm. Sometimes they are stressed when I really need data for something, but most of the time I think (I hope) they are just there because they want to be. I always try my best to find the self-directed people during the interview process. I laughed when my lab peeps told me that, when asked by interviewees what my biggest pet-peeve is, they always answer "She gets really annoyed if you are not self-motivated"...and it's true. I think it's awesome that they lay down the law for me.

Vernazza (Cinque Terre) is just a couple of weeks away

Culture is better implemented when upper management provides the example and your lab may mostly be a reflection of the culture you set, but people in the lab have to embrace it. I don't really believe in work/life balance in academia, since I don't know any scientist who doesn't email at midnight. The first year of being a PI cured me of any expectations of ever having a reduced workload. However, I realized that, to survive this crazy ride, science has to be in harmony with your life. Some days I dream to take the afternoon off to catch up on the journal table of contents in peace, or plan a foreign vacation including a visit to one of the local scientific institutes because it would be fun. Other days I watch six hours of Orange is the New Black instead of working on a grant, or take a three hour lunch break to watch the World Cup. Call me crazy, but in the end it's all about enjoying what you do.

Note: A great post on burnout from blogger Psycgirl!

What is this Twitter you all talk about?

After some crazy recent traffic due to a couple of tweets referencing my blog, I decided to give this Twitter thing a try. So if you wish you can now follow me @TheNewPI on Twitter.

I promise I will try and keep it active, as it may be easier to tweet websites and career development tips, than to construct a proper post. I have big plans for the FENS Forum in a couple of weeks where a great symposium on Women in Academia should provide some food for thought.

In the meantime, the BBC Radio has been broadcasting a Tweet of the Day that has nothing to do with Twitter.

Learning how to hire #4: figuring out who should be in your lab

I am back to hiring again, and though in no shape or form I feel like a know what I am doing, I figured out a few things from the past few rounds of hiring. So to follow up the past three installments of my "Learning how to hire" series (here, here and here), I am going to keep sharing what is going through my mind.

The one pieces of advice I have received from almost every senior investigator I asked for pills of wisdom about starting a lab was "Do not be afraid of the emptiness of the lab. Take you time in hiring the best people you can find." I had friends with lots of horror stories about wrong hires, so I tried to be very careful. I discovered that making the final decision about who should be in the lab can be incredibly difficult and that my thinking and my interview strategy have changed greatly compared to a year ago.

Sometimes take a calculated gamble. Last year around this time I was looking for a research assistant using Craigslist and wading through almost two hundred applications. I primarily needed someone who could help set-up the zebrafish facility, and I had to decide among professional fish techs, enthusiastic undergrads and professional lab techs with no fish experience. I was confronted with a wide range of salaries and qualifications. Would it be worthwhile to spend $70,000 on a professional aquatics tech who could get terribly bored, but save me the headache of starting an aquatic program from scratch without any experience? Should I go with a self-proclaimed fast-learner with a passion for neuroscience who had just finished college and just wing it? Then someone showed up out of left field, with extensive aquatic experience in the commercial sector, a background in neuroscience and a burning desire to come back into academia to pursue graduate studies. If your tech applicant already sounds like a graduate student, it is a really good sign. The gamble on someone who had an eclectic background paid off in spades, as we now have a wonderful fish facility which was showcased at a national facility management conference, plus I have someone who actually enjoys doing experiments.

Take your time to figure out what you need and be flexible. The first round of interviews I did took almost 6 months and $2-3,000 in travel expenses, but ended with two rejected offers. I focused on applicants with behavioral experience who ended up preferring to do more circuit-based approaches than the cellular/molecular work I do. There was a disconnect between the candidates I thought would be good for my lab and the career aspiration of students with the qualifications I wanted, so I had to regroup. I realized that I what I really wanted was someone whose passion was biochemistry and cell biology to do some kick-ass live imaging. So, that is the expertise I went after. Right now I need someone to staff the zebrafish project, but the candidates I have are very different from each other and I may need to be flexible in determining what I really want and what can be achieved with training.

Think in 3 to 5 year parcels. I am still trying to figure out what is sustainable. One piece of advice I received was to hire as many postdocs as I could to generate lots of preliminary data to get more grants.  While this does make sense to me, I also need to determine for how long I will be able to pay these people. There are lots of senior postdocs losing their jobs right now because the funding climate sucks. I am getting applications for very highly qualified people on their 3rd or 4th postdoc and while really tempting, unless it is an absolutely perfect match I have to turn them down immediately. They are way too expensive and my lab is too small at the moment to allow them to pursue their own independent projects. I do want my postdocs eventually to work on their own things and be successful, but the dynamics with someone right out of grad school vs. someone who has been leading projects for 10 years are very different. A postdoc on their 3rd experience cannot commit 3-5 years to developing a project and I cannot be sure that I will be able to pay them for that long. It's a lose-lose situation for both parties.

In the end, I think the choice of what your lab is going to be is a very personal one, based on the lab culture you want, your mentoring style and your publishing plan. I can assure you that having the right mix of people will make it fun to go to work every day.

Distributing effort on your grants (especially if you have an R00)

The original post was published on 6/7/2014, but updated with additional info following some great comments on 7/30/2013

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".  Well, actually with 75% effort often tied to an R00 award, that is a real problem to consider. Especially if you go on a grant writing frenzy as I did. So I have learned a few things about distributing effort in the past year.

1) You may need to keep 5-15% for teaching and other academic activities. This will depend on where you are and how much the university contributes to your salary, but this was news to me. I guess it makes sense, since teaching and service must come from somewhere. If you commit yourself 100% to research then you have no effort to give for administrative and other work. Some universities will ask that you put 100% of your salary on grants, but others will not, so you need to discuss with your department chair or your grants administrator how to do this.

2) You must plan the distribution of your effort. If you have an R00, you must spend 75% of your effort on research and at the beginning this will be tied to your R00. If you are planning to apply for a bigger grant, like an R01 and want to devote 25-30% effort, you need to communicate with your Program Officer and let them know, so that when the grant gets funded you can adjust your R00 effort. The 75% research rule can be tricky, as different NIH institutes may have different policies and you should familiarize yourself with yours. You can also opt for foundation grants and you have to be careful about effort there. Most of these grants, while substantial, will not allow PI salary, but still require effort. I put 10 or 15% effort on every grant I applied for and quickly would have been out, since these grants were on a different project. Every grant had to be reduced to 5% and I heard of people putting 1 or 0.5% on foundation grants. Foundations tend to be more lenient with effort and will provide 1-2 full salaries for the people working on the actual research, so that you have someone with 100% effort on the project and you just need to provide direction.

3) Effort may be not tied to actual grant money (cost-sharing). You may put effort on a grant which does not allow PI salary and your department may cost-share your salary, i.e. agree to pay that portion of your salary necessary for you to perform/guide the research. Doing some internet searches I discovered cost-sharing is not favored by some schools where departments prefer not to pay, but it is something that you should keep in mind.

4) You must plan your grant strategy in advance. With my R00 ending early in 2016, I should apply for an R01 in February or June next year (see timelines for review here). Because some grants may take more than a year to be approved and funded, you need to consider where that big chunk of your salary is coming from each year, thinking a year and a half ahead.

5) Buy out of teaching or buy into teaching. If you have enough effort on grants and do not want to teach, you can buy out of teaching. Conversely, if you need the university to pay more of your salary, you can add a course to your load.

Your grants administrator or your department chair should be able to help you devise a strategy on how to best distribute your effort. Effort reporting is strictly regulated, especially on federal funds, so you have to consider all these issues carefully and make sure your effort is appropriately distributed. The NIH has some handy descriptions on how to calculate effort distribution here.

On mentoring: reflections on an empty nest

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

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

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

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

Freezers and fridges for your lab

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

Snowflakes at the electron microscope

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


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

Hope this helps.

Setting up your lab website

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salary negotiations for K99 and R00 awardees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The New PI" turns ONE!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awesome books about writing an NIH grant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How social media will change the way we publish science

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

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

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

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

Developing your annual performance review criteria

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

How to start a "grant club"

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

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

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

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