- Unpacking Mental Health: A Book Review
The words “mental health” and “mental illness” are frequently thrown around these days in both society and academe. However, their true nature is rarely defined or understood. Much of our culture simply doesn’t know how to talk about these topics constructively, allowing their ...
- Advice for (New) Assistant Professors Extravaganza
Originally posted in #MHAWS: Mirya Holman's Aggressive Winning Scholars Newsletter.
Hello darlings!
Welcome to the annual “Mirya Holman gives some advice to (new) assistant professors” extravaganza! MHGSATNAPE just rolls off the tongue, right?
Here’s the advice I gave last y...
- NIH’s New Data Sharing Policy: Not So Scary
NIH now requires a formal data sharing plan for each grant they receive. (A few exceptions, primarily T32s and F grants, exist.) It sounds complicated, but they've actually made it pretty easy. You're probably already doing some of what's required.
First of all, there's a ...
- The Art of Being Helpful: Mentor vs. Coach vs. Advisor vs. Sponsor
Imagine that someone you’ve been mentoring for the past few years walks into your office one day and says, “Thank you so much for being a great mentor to me. I was thinking about applying for a leadership position that just opened up. What do you think?”
You remember that ...
- Lessons Learned While Building a Career: Grants
I’ve written lots of grants. Some of them even got funded! Here are some things I learned in my journey from foundation grants to K08 to R01.
Grants beget grants
I was fortunate to have a T32 fellowship during my post-doc, after my clinical training. This helped me gain add...
- De-Mystifying Single IRB: Let IREx Help!
As you travel the long, often winding and shadowy trail of initiating a new study across multiple sites, you may suddenly find a fork in the path to your welcoming mead hall – a requirement to use a single IRB (sIRB). From afar it seems simple enough to traverse, but what doe...
- Lessons Learned While Building a Research Career: Mentoring Matters
I’ve been building my research career since I finished my clinical training and started in my fellowship lab in 2012. Over the years, I’ve learned some lessons I’ll share in this three-part series. First up: Mentoring Matters.
Choosing mentors and a lab environment for you...
- The Power of Strong Collaborations
Biomedical science is no longer primarily conducted by brilliant individuals running their own labs and writing paper after paper using the same methodology that they have perfected over the course of their training and career. Even the seemingly simplest of projects likely requi...
- Perfection is a Productivity Blocker
I recently attended the Edge for Scholars Retreat: Building Collaborations, Creating Connections and learned so much about connecting with others throughout an academic career. Meeting new people at a similar career stage and getting advice from those who have gone before us made...
- Why Managing Technostress is Key
As I arrive to my office, the first thing I do is check my email, which has become an unconscious habit as a way of prioritizing my tasks and, oftentimes, putting out fires. From there, I will take a plethora of remote meetings via popular video conferencing apps such as Zoom and...
