- Academic Non-Renewal: Don’t Think it Can’t Happen to You
Three years ago this week, I was given my 1-year’s notice that my tenure track Assistant Professor job would be non-renewed. Huh?! But we’ve been pulling together my promotion and tenure package for the past six months! Sorry, we’re not allowing you to go up for promotion and ten...
- Not that Kind of Grant: Tales of Early Career Investigator Grants
As a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, my mentors wrote National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Terrible Disease Foundation grants. That was it. Imagine my surprise when I started as a new principal investigator (PI), and I was inundated with grants of which I had never h...
- Research Manuscripts Should Tell Really Good Stories
Book Review: The Art of Scientific Storytelling by Rafael E. Luna, PhD
Chapter 1: Introduction
Skim or skip. This section promotes the book and the promising ideas it conveys, when many of us (me, me, me) just want to get to the meat of the book. After several pages it reads ...
- Using NIH RePORTER to Find Your Guide
In much the same way the Assisted Referral Tool can help you pick a study section, the Program Official option for NIH’s Matchmaker tool provides insight into the Program Officer who works with the most projects that look like yours.
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- Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide
“My goal is to help rid the world of ineffective graphs, one exploding, 3D pie chart at a time.”
Drawing from the fields of graphic illustration, functional art, behavioral science and storytelling, Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is a must for academics who ...
- Not that Kind of Scientist: Tales of Teaching
If you come from a research-intensive PhD program and postdoc, you, like me, lack teaching experience. Outside of one semester of service as a teaching assistant in graduate school, I have never lectured in a course. To those of you who teach regularly, develop multiple courses, ...
- The Benefits of Flying Solo
For the past three years, I went to all the meetings and conferences by myself. I love traveling, and going to conferences provides me with the opportunity to go to new places and visit friends.
When I was in grad school in Spain, I usually went to the meetings with all my lab...
- 10 Reasons to Use Trello for Any Size Team
List-makers make great leaders because keeping track of tasks helps organize the workOrganizing thoughts formally in lists, and in light of other demands, keeps projects moving forward and avoids missing key details or competing demands. For team leaders, it can be even more cruc...
- All About My Mentor
For the past three years, every time I heard someone talking about their path to success – understanding success as something utopic and unachievable – they always shared a magic recipe: hard work, perseverance, resilience, don’t be afraid of failure, a little bit of luck here a...
- Not that Kind of Page: Tales of Building a Better Lab Website
In this day and age, every company has a website. You are running a small business and you should too. There are even murmurs that searches for your name will peak right before study section, as study section members look up the people whose grants they will be reviewing. Here ar...