A day in the life of a newish PI: Thursday September 17th

A couple of weeks ago I suggested a series of posts based on "a day in the life of a newish PI". The array of BS and of random things that a new investigator has to do is staggering and this is sometimes made unbearable by a generalized institutional inability to get anything done or anything fixed. Just yesterday, Dr. Acclimatrix tweeted

I'm so bogged down by renovations, service, undergrad advising, and red tape that my research program is suffering. This can't be normal.

— Dr. Acclimatrix (@Acclimatrix) September 14, 2015

What is normal in academia? I am 2.5 years in and I don't know if my days are normal, or insane, or if I'm doing things I should not be doing. So I proposed I would log my activities during 3 days chosen by readers in the next 3 months. The days are September 17, October 1 and November 9. While I'll be traveling a lot this Fall, none of those days are travel/conference days, so they will be just run-of-the-mill lab management days. Let's see what happens and what random adventures will pop up! I would love if others decided to do this too to compare or if they commented about it.

8:00am. I know today is going to be super busy so after a good night's sleep I start with a 3mi run. I have a race on Sunday and I was crippled by running injuries all summer.  Since regular strength training wasn't helping, my PT guy dry needled the trigger points in my IT band last week and it was like magic! Running is the best way I have to deal with stress and increase energy on the job, so I'm really happy to be back in business.

9:00-9:30am. Phone interview with a job candidate for research assistant. I have discussed my experience with hiring in the past, so I will shamelessly plug my "Learning how to hire" series (#1, #2, #3, #4). But briefly, I have a script to follow for 20-30 min interviews, so that everyone answers the same questions. Also I cluster the interviews in 1-2 days to concentrate and reduce the pain of it. I'm doing 5 of these today.

9:30-10:00am. Get to work.

10:00-10:55am. Second phone interview. Emails piling up...couldn't get the candidate to stop talking.

11:00-11:30am. Third phone interview.

11:30-11:45am. Catch up with email. Trying to match my postdoc salaries to the NIH recommended as they are lagging behind the new guidelines. Going back and forth with my department chair, who's going back and forth with the associate dean.

11:45am-12:00pm. Run through the lab. Discuss pump malfunction in the fish room and remediation plans for repairs and water supply. Setting up new image analysis workstation and getting a desk upstairs from storage downstairs has been going on for a week now. Need to coordinate with Facilities about moving the desk.

12:00-12:30pm. Fourth phone interview.

12:30-1:30pm. When I scheduled all the interviews, of course, I had forgotten that today was the career mentoring day for one of my postdocs. I am planning a more detailed post, but every 1-2 months I take each person in the lab out for coffee or lunch to discuss career trajectory, strategy, plans or just to answer their questions. The goal is to avoid talking specific experiments/projects and focus on the bigger career development picture. One of the things we discussed today was the accounting that goes into planning salaries for the lab and the latest discussions on raising postdoc salaries, hiring staff scientists and promoting running a lab on one R01 .

1:40-1:50pm. Twitter.

1:50-2:00pm. Going over emails. Postdoc sent a list of plasmids to order for a project. I looked them over then recommended gene synthesis, because I hate cloning and inflicting cloning on other people.

2:00-2:10pm. Phone interview candidate not picking up the phone...Annoyed.

2:10-2:30pm. Using this half hour of freedom to 1) sign some requisitions for orders, 2) figure out that a ticket was in fact generated to get our new desk upstairs for the imaging station, 3) package a whole bunch of CRISPR primers I bought for our collaborator, so that I can send them to her.

2:30-3:00pm. Taking the chance to go down to our injection room with my tech to check that our second injector has been setup and to switch microscopes around. Bumped into Facilities manager and mover to discuss emergency water supply to fish room...and about moving the desk. Because the more people know about your problems, the likelier it is someone will solve them.

3:15-3:45pm. Our weekly seminar is sometimes held at an Affiliated Hospital (AH), which is hard to get to. I decided to go this week because I have been trying to pin down a collaborator at AH for months and I managed to schedule a meeting after the seminar. Naturally, collaborator emailed yesterday and cancelled, but I had already told people I would go and set up other meetings, so I got in a cab... I lost my phone a couple of weeks ago and I had nothing to do but stare out of the window for 30 mins...Yay!

3:45-4:00pm. Since I was early, I barged into the office of a colleague working on sexually dimorphic brain circuits to discuss our awesome new results. Sexually dimorphic behavior ensues when I asked him where he thought we should submit: he said Nature, while I was thinking of Nature Communications. Men are from Mars...

4:00-5:00pm. While I only marginally cared about the seminar and I just went to be a good citizen, it was actually pretty good. And it was basically the only scientific activity in my day.

5:30-7:30pm. The postdoc organization at AH asked me to be part of a career development panel next week. The organizers wanted to go out for drinks with the panelists and some other faculty to discuss what to expect at the panel discussion. Very fun and stimulating conversation.

8:00pm. Home. If I wanted to I could edit the postdoctoral application package of a former student, but I'm tired, so I'll do it tomorrow. I'll watch TV instead.

So, today was about management and mentoring and had very little to do with doing science or with anything I had done before becoming a PI. It was a day with a pretty heavy load of things, but I've had worse. What strikes me about this job is that I cannot honestly tell you what a typical day is, because every day is different. Today was a "busy non-science" type of day.  When you start a lab, it seems that this kind of day is all you get, but luckily these are getting rarer as I go on with this job. How was your day?

See additional "day in the life" posts from @FitAcademic on getting things done, @PsycGrrrl on fighting ignorance even when you are horribly sick and @bashir9ist who had a run-of-the-mill new investigator day filled with meetings, teaching, writing, ordering, etc..

To Glam or not to Glam: that is the question...

In following the discussion between Jean-Francois Gariepy and Potnia Theron this week I find myself somewhat in the middle. Briefly, Gariepy is disgusted with academia, the frauds, the pressure to publish only fancy papers or too many papers, and he's leaving to spend time with his son (which is commendable). Potty defended academia saying that fraud is not that widespread, that academic pressure is not that different from pressure in other professional fields and basically that Gariepy should realize that not everyone is like he thinks.

I mostly agree with Potty, but I also understand where Jean-Francois is coming from. I have never worked at Duke and do not know the general environment and his specific environment, but I have been to multiple places like Duke. When the stakes are really high and the pressure piles up and PIs are set on a shiny idea, fraud happens and it's usually perpetrated by individuals and sometime supported by institutional culture. I find that each institution is different in how they react. In my 15+ years I have been privy to maybe 4-5 glaring falsification cases and I have heard of many others. The PIs reactions have been varied. In one case the PI was very well respected and still at the bench, he tried to replicate the results and found out that all the constructs were faked to generate the desired results (very skilled fraud), he reported it, retracted the paper, lost most of his major funding as a result. In another the PI protected the result, refused to retract, went through an audit and lived to live another day as a fancy department director. But these are very isolated cases, mostly I have seen people cut corners. And what I find is that people cut corners more frequently if they were not trained correctly as grad students and if they were pushed to generated data without careful scrutiny or training. So while I think Jean-Francois is grandstanding at times, I get where he is at. I've been disgusted myself, but I have an internal compass and I follow my compass. The majority of the scientists I know follow those same rules, even in what Potty calls the "BSD/Glam world". They know which papers are good and which ones are bad. They know who the cheaters are.

What I don't understand is the demonization of the Glam world. In my mind a Nature paper is a monumental achievement. I have seen the genesis of multiple Cell, Nature and Science papers and the amount of work and money and grit that it takes to get one is amazing. While sometimes you can get a CNS paper with a phenomenal idea, I find those papers to be the minority. Most CNS papers I have seen originated from an interesting finding that was studied from every side and understood mechanistically after 4-5 years of work and probably 2 years of revisions. Sometimes this is not worth it. I have seen a large number of grad students be pushed to the brink to get a CNS paper and just leave academia right after their PhD. I have seen careers destroyed by CNS while people waited 7 years to publish because they only wanted to be in one of the top 3 journals. I have also seen people with exceptional stories be rejected, get into other journals and still be recognized for their work.

Do I hate CNS with the same vitriol found on Twitter? No. I think it's important to have a benchmark. I still strive to hit that benchmark every day, the benchmark to understand how a natural phenomenon works. I marvel at some Nature, Science and Cell (and Nature Neuroscience and Neuron) papers, I teach them to my students and help them understand what it takes. I wave my fist at the sky when the same journals publish trendy crap from powerful people, but mostly my cry is "Who? Who reviewed this BS?" However, I still make my choices based on my career necessities. I like full multi-faceted stories and I want to be proud of my work, but sometimes understanding a mechanism takes 10 years. Sometimes you need to cut a story short because you need a paper out for a grant. Or competition requires you to move quickly. Or you need a descriptive study to start a mechanistic study. And so you parcel out pieces of a bigger story that still makes you proud. If people run around "like headless chicken", like Jean-Francois suggests, then those people are idiots and don't really know what they are doing. But maybe from the outside it looks like headless chickens and in 15 years we'll see them give a talk with a perfectly constructed story where each paper is a slide in the presentation. Only time will tell.

I usually explain my job of running a lab in an R1 institution like running a small business. I have to pay for the salary and benefits of my people, publications are my product which gets me my financing and presentations are my advertisement. Teaching is my pro bono work. Some labs are like Apple, full of shiny and trendy products, but always in beta. Some labs are like oil companies, always using the same reservoir thinking it will never run dry. Some labs want to stay local mom&pop operations and some others want to make it big...Some have international subsidiaries.

I like it. This is the type of job I want. Like all my friends in banking or pharma I struggle every day with the fact that I am embedded in a corporation, a "non-profit" corporation in the business of education and healthcare. But at the same time, I love my lab. I love my employees and I love my product. I stand firmly behind it and will not cut corners. As people go through their PhD and postdoc they have to look at the reality of what these jobs entail and decide whether they are for them or not. Working at an R1 medical school is different than working at an R1 undergraduate school and is even more different than working at a liberal arts college. AND each school is different in their culture and values...really different. Same as in every job, you find your niche where you can do your thing, or you find a good enough fit you can live with, or you decide you are better suited to something else. None of these things can be construed as success or failure.

I find it reductive to throw away all academia because it's full of cheaters and thoughtless drones or to damn the Glam world because some people don't reproduce findings. Academia is not one thing. And it's very cool because of its diversity. And yes there are lots of problems that need to be fixed, some systemic and some institutional, but that will require a lot more posts from better people than me. :)

PS: and now I head to lab to check on my CRISPRs...because it's trendy ;)

What's the right size? Lab evolution

What have I done?! In a week my lab will grow to 9 people...I'm medium-sized.

— The New PI (@TheNewPI) September 2, 2015

I have taken in more part-time students in the lab few and, feeling a bit overwhelmed by this growth, I tweeted about it. This spurred a very interesting discussion about what is the "medium" size for a research lab and how much money it really takes to run a lab. This got me thinking about how much one's experience dictates how we do things in academia. As you learn to do the job of a principal investigator on the fly, you set your standards based on what you know and what you liked.

We are *well* into three simultaneous R01 awards just to cover the staff of a "medium" sized lab. No Prof effort, no supplies, reagents...

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) September 3, 2015

I went from being in 10-15 people labs, which were pretty much the norm where I was, to a 20+ person lab, which was not the norm, but wasn't a rare occurrence either. An average size 2 R01 lab in my experience is around 10. Not necessarily 10 fully salaried people, more 5-6 full-time and 3-4 part time students (undergrad, rotation, volunteers). When I had to think about what I wanted when I was interviewing for jobs, I decided that I didn't want a huge lab because I like mentoring and I would lose contact with my people. I liked the bustle and flow of my grad school lab, so that's what I'm going for. Also my space does not allow for more.

As you learn to be an adult by watching your parents and other adults, your experience of lab life is molded by where you grew up scientifically. I'm discovering this makes a huge difference in how you design your lab and how you adjust to different environments. In parallel, your personality and how you prefer to be treated dictate how you treat others. Learning how to leverage different personalities and how to manage people that do not think like you is one of the biggest difficulties you encounter as a leader. You may want to work with people who are highly independent and able to think on their feet, but this type of worker may get bored doing more menial tasks or very repetitive project that you still need done. I am having frequent discussions with my colleagues on how they deploy undergraduates and high-school students, and whether they prefer postdocs or graduate students. Everyone is different. Even my own thinking continues to evolve as I go along and as I balance adding more people with priorities for specific projects.  I thought I would never set up an assembly line, as there is nothing that I loathed more as a student, yet I find myself designing one because I just need things to get done. As much as I'm overwhelmed by the number of people in the lab, I'm in extreme need of them because there is just too much to do.  I'd be interested in hearing how other people deal with these issues.

A day in the life of a newish PI challenge

As a trainee I always wondered what my PI was doing cooped up on her/his office and when I became a PI myself I was shocked by the endless list of things I was now responsible for. A good friend became a PI last week and he was complaining about some administrative delay...all I could say was "Welcome to the other side". While I do try to shelter the people in my lab as much as possible from all the madness in my life, I think it may be a good idea to chronicle a day in the life of a new (or now newish) PI. It may be interesting for trainees to see the breadth of items and extent of multitasking required on some days. Not to put them off, but to actually make them aware of the additional skills they would need to develop to do the job. Since I myself sometime lose track of everything I'm doing and I have been meaning to figure out where all my time goes, I'm willing to go through the exercise and write down what I do...
Here are the rules, you, my readers, pick one date in October or November and post it in the comments. So that I don't bias my reporting based on my schedule and we get a random sample, I'll blog on each of the first 3 dates a chronological list of what I did that day and the approx. duration for each task.

If someone else wants to join in and blog on the same day, it would be awesome to see what everyone is doing, as things are probably very different at different universities and career stages.

Selected days were September 17 (here),  October 1 (here) and November 9 (here with a twist)

GIF credit: Juggler with 10 balls, generated by Mathematica Details

Doing more for the K to R01 transition: the NHLBI way

At an NHLBI K-to-R01 meeting speaker is quoting @TheNewPI @drugmonkeyblog and others who provide great advice for new investigators.

— Blanca Himes (@blancahimes) July 28, 2015

This week I was honored and excited to be cited, together with none other than DrugMonkey, as someone who provides good advice for new investigators, but what really caught my eye in the tweet was "NHLBI K-to-R01 Meeting". What was that, pray tell?
Luckily, one of my friends and colleagues is an NHLBI (Heart, Lung and Blood) K99/R00 grantee and was attending the meeting, so I got to snoop around.

The transition from K08/K01/R00 to R01 has been notoriously difficult. Both Data Hound and DrugMonkey have discussed this, here and here. Data Hound's analysis of the data of R00 to R01 transition showed that after 6 years from the start of the K99, half or less awardees have transitioned to an R01. Some people are told to transition early so that the study section will not require independent publications, some others (like myself) are told that an R01-like productivity is required. The NHLBI noticed the difficulties its trainees were experiencing and decided to do something about it, and it's awesome.

K-award recipients attend a 2 day meeting focused on helping them for the R01 transition. Talks from former trainees who have successfully transitioned and the usual discussion on how to apply for an R01 and what happens on a study section, are accompanied by panel discussion on the different NHLBI divisions and introduction to all the program officers who discuss their interests and lead break-out sections. In my opinion, this is truly invaluable. In talking to colleagues, I realized I had a very pro-active program officer, whom I met in person during the very first year of my K99 as she was roaming the halls of the Society for Neuroscience meeting in DC to come to meet her grantees, but she is not necessarily the norm. My colleague with the NHLBI K99 met his program officer for the first time at this K-to-R01 meeting. Having the chance to pick the brain of division chiefs and program officers, to discuss different study sections and to present your plans for your own lab could improve your chances of success in this horrible funding climate. Plus, such a meeting allows all the promising young investigators in similar fields to get together and network.

I was really impressed. I wonder if there is a way to get other institutes to do this. Are you aware of any other institute with similar programs?

Note from the Twittersphere:

Thanks to @TheSpenceLab we found out that the NIDDK (Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Disease) also has a similar workshop (invitation only) for its trainees. Link here. They have also developed a special R03 ($50,000/year for 2 years) just for their K01/K08/K23 grantees (PAR-12-285). Apparently they tend to prefer K01s to K99s and push people towards smaller mentored grants.

Interestingly, @jmcin9 points out that the NIDCD (Deafness and Other Communication Disorders) also uses R03s as tool to help trainees toward independence and has a separate PAR from the standard one (PAR-13-057).

Another annual identity crisis on the tenure track

Multiple possible directions! I liked that the university is
opposite to Prosecco station...

A couple of years ago I had written about the fear of branching into a new field of science. When
your research brings in an unexpected direction and you have to "make friends" with a whole different crowd who speaks a slightly different language. At the time I welcomed the challenge and branched out. I wanted to pursue a really cool and little studied question, which may take forever to figure out, and I'm still doing it. However, since I've been running the lab I found myself at a similar crossroads over and over again, and I resisted. Choosing to embark in a new literature and a new network was just too daunting for an overstretched new investigator. I decided to hire postdocs instead and to send them out into the world to learn about the new fields we need to get to know and to make their own contacts. It didn't quite work out as I expected. They did love the exposure and collected comments and ideas for their projects, but as the primary grant writer and the "big picture" person in the group I still need to get my own hands dirty. As the one at the helm of this boat, I need to actually steer and to steer I need to know the currents and the stars (as far as I know there is no GPS guidance for science).

The overwhelming fear is to become too diffuse and spread thin, to lose my identity. Everyone tells you that as a new investigator trying to become "established" (whatever that means...) you have to FOCUS, you have to forge your persona and make sure that people know about you and your accomplishments so that you get invited for talks and meetings to spread the gospel of your research. See an awesome post on how to get noticed by Dr. Becca. I already feel like a shape-shifter: one day I talk about disease, one day about very basic cell biology or molecular biology or genetics, one day I work on human sequencing data, the next I inject zebrafish embryo, and the next I go over mouse behavior data. I'm a jack of all trades and master of none. I have always worked this way and run multiple parallel operations. I really enjoy the intellectual exercise of connecting different dots, but I can't help but wonder whether this is the reason why I feel like I have made no big scientific contribution. I've never reached the necessary depth. Thus, the idea of taking on another field terrifies me.

Yet, my identity crisis last year was about not fitting in what I used to see as my field any more. There is security in having built a network of like-minded scientists, in knowing the history and the gossip, which questions have gone hot and then cold, but science moves forward and you move with it. In the past couple of months I talked to a few friends who are at or just past tenure and I was surprised to hear that I am not alone in this struggle. Everyone listed half a dozen things they do and talked about feeling lonely at some new conference trying to break into a field where they didn't know anyone. The trick, it seems, is to find multiple new directions and then go all in when something really works. I'm starting to think that these may be just growing pains, the sense of fear you have when your lab is getting bigger than something you could have handled alone. I am taking inspiration from Nicola Spaldin's recent piece on "Finding your most interesting question" and doing my best not to be afraid.

Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons

Why postdocs should ask for more in general

I thought I'd weigh in on the kerfuffle going on on Twitter about the mostly irrational fears that Obama will force us to pay postdocs $50K. I'll have to start by admitting that I was never a "disgruntledoc" and I often wondered why people whine so much. When I was looking for postdocs I think I just accepted the job without even asking about salary and received an offer letter that stated that I would be guaranteed the NIH minimum for 24 months and then I was supposed to obtain fellowships to pay for my own salary. If I was able to do this, I would receive a 10% raise over whatever my salary was at the time. Within a year, I had my own fellowship and paid first for most, then for all my salary and fringe. However, I also knew that if I ran out of money, my boss could spot me if I was productive (or fire me if I was not). It is normal in any job that you can be fired if you don't produce or if the company goes out of business or closes down you unit. I also assumed that I was supposed to start writing grants as much as possible, since this is what would be required of me for the rest of my career. By the 5th year of my postdoc I had been promoted to a non-tenure track staff position and I made $63K. I should have made $75K as recommended for my position, but I needed money for exome sequencing, so I capped my own salary. I was comfortable, saving for retirement and paying my mortgage (in Boston, not in Iowa City), but had I had a child with a $1400/month daycare bill or even a car to take care of things would have been very very different. Then I started talking to friends who still made less than $40K after 4-5 years of postdoc, and friends at institutions that cap postdoc salaries at $50K so that you can never ever make more. Yes, yes, as a grad student in New York City, fresh off the boat from Europe, I was giddy for my $18,000 stipend, BUT in your mid-30s you need some sense of stability, you need to know that your work is valued and that your life is going somewhere. So I am shocked whenever PIs say that asking for $50K is too much. One of the most depressing thing that happened to me was when I got my first postdoc paycheck and it was only $200 more than my grad student one. Where had the extra $1,000/month gone? Damn you, FICA!! After all, one thing I learned in this great country that is America, is that you are worth what they pay you. No PhDs working for free, no 6-month in between postdoctoral fellowships when you have to go to lab anyways, like in the old country.

So the thing, Postdocs, is that you have to ask, because I find that most people don't ask nicely and venting on Twitter doesn't accomplish much. It only hit me recently that I was in a privileged position. That I was given clear guidelines and expectations, fair raises (including an annual review with a discussion about salary), a lab flush with cash and in addition, a very very strong office for postdoctoral development with constant seminars and workshops on grant writing, management, job talk delivery, you name it. And with "given" I don't mean as an unexpected gift and I was Oh, so lucky!, I mean that it was available to me and I took it and I worked like crazy to make sure I was successful. I had friends who asked for a $15K raise for childcare expenses and got it, and friends who asked and only got $5K, and friends who asked and got roped in writing a grant so that they could get the raise because there was no money. If your boss is an asshole and you lab is hell, you should just leave or start plotting your exit. In most cases, your boss is probably crazy busy and going insane trying to figure out how to keep the lab running. If they don't automatically offer mentoring, you should ask for it. I see myself as a good mentor, but I was in the middle of first R01 hell and I had an undergrad who made sure he scheduled regular meetings to talk to me. Every time I thanked him for being so proactive because my schedule was so crazy I would not have known how much time had passed. If your boss is not really the "mentorly" type, which is possible and still workable if they provide other assets, you find another mentor or better a group of mentors (see an older post on this). If career development workshops are not available at your institution, ask for them. Start a postdoc group at your university. Most likely some Associate Dean will be happy to give you $100 for pizza because they've been "meaning to do more for trainee development but have not gotten around to it". You cannot wake up in the middle of year 5 of your postdoc and realize that you are paid nothing, have never applied for a grant, work for a jerk and are all alone. Then you should just be angry at yourself. There was a great post today from Dr. Acclimatrix on learning how to fail better on the academic job market, which means that at least if you fail because you are unlucky and the market sucks you have done your homework and are a step closer to succeeding.

But then, be careful what you ask for, because you have no idea whatsoever of what's on the other side. You think you do, but you don't, because most of us in the corner office are doing their best to screen you from all the bullshit that goes on in our job, so that you can do your job. In some cases, we are probably too embarrassed about such bullshit to actually talk to you about it, because we are afraid to disrupt morale or to make you want to look for another job. As we freak out about our own career, life and family, we simultaneously freak out about the future of everyone in the lab. Because it's not my salary that keeps me up at night right now, it's my people's salaries. How long can I keep them? How much money do I need to bank if I don't get an R01 within a year? How do I buy them an extra 6 months of funding? A friend starting a lab recently asked me what I had learned about money management and I replied that all that matters is salaries (and mouse costs, but she's a zebrafish person, so she didn't care). So, part of me, also gets the angry PIs harping about an extra $10K expense. It's not easy on the other side when all you see is the bottom line getting smaller and smaller. There are multiple solutions, but trainees, PIs, universities and funding agencies have to work together to make things feasible and the government has to provide the money. I won't go into this, but if you have not, there are some really interesting suggestions originating from the U. Wisconsin Madison workshop on rescuing the biomedical workforce.

The psychology of writing your first R01

Denial
Two months before the deadline: "I totally got this. I have it all figured out and will be able to whip it up in a month or so to give my readers lots of time to make it perfect."

Anger
One month before the deadline: "WHAT IS GOING ON? WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING? It made sense last month. Now nothing makes sense, the pieces do not fit. THIS GRANT SUCKS!!"

Bargaining
Three weeks before the deadline "Okay, if I move this piece and this piece and put them here....and then remove this...no, put this back...remove this other thing....rephrase this...rephrase this....rephrase this..."

Depression
One week before the deadline: "It's all useless. This is a worthless piece of crap. The study section will think I'm a loser. I should just skip to next cycle or maybe never write on of these again. What else could I be doing with my life? Maybe it's not too late to go back to school. Would it be a problem for admissions that I'm already a university professor?"

Acceptance
Two days before the deadline: "It's a decent effort, it makes no sense to keep changing it over and over again, so I'll pull the trigger now. At least if it gets discussed I'll get comments back. Need to get to work on the other two grants due in the next three weeks."

And more here, here and here

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

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

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

The end of the R01 twin strategy: what I learned

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

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

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

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

Interviewing for a postdoc? Questions you should ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the faculty job market? Questions you should ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now year 3 begins!

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

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

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

Networking 101: Why follow-up emails matter

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

Johannes Vermeer - Lady with her maidservant
holding a letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideas, comments, advice are welcome.