A few years ago I asked one of our primary mentors, Dr. Julie Locher, to share with our early career investigators advice that she shares with her mentees as well as advice she had been given throughout her career.
This is Audie Cornish. Audie is my 1-year old Shiba Inu/Rottweiler mix who never has to pee. This is odd, because most larger mammals have a pretty pressing need to pee a couple of times a day. But not Audie. She shuns the whimpering, sad-eyed looks of other pets and sits there happily doing whatever she’s […]
What makes a funny joke? What makes a strong grant application? Sometimes, the same things. In the video below, Jerry Seinfeld describes his joke-writing process and takes the viewer through the evolution of a joke about Pop Tarts. It took two years, and as you can see, many revisions and rewrites to distill the material […]
If you are based at one of 135 US institutions and you recruit human subjects, you need to check out ResearchMatch.org to find potential research participants from a growing pool that now includes 108,181 individuals willing to be in research.
One of my favorite parts of being a faculty member is interviewing students, fellows and future faculty members. For reasons that elude my tiny Fighty Squirrel brain, folks think if you are a female and people liked you when they interviewed, it means you are nice. I’m not particularly nice. Ask my kids. What I […]
Chasing tenure translates into a life people outside the academic do not understand. I am often amazed by the importance professors place on their tenure above their families, their sanity, and their lives. Everything will be OK, tenure or not.
Congrats….you are off to that awesome annual meeting you adore where your science friends chat you up, cheer you on and buy you a beer. Here’s some protips on making the most of your time, some fun things to do to pass the time and a stern look over my glasses for those of […]
So you’re not a dancer. You’re not a musician. You’re not an artist or a poet. Why read this book? Because you have ideas: ideas for new population studies, new treatments for disease, and new ways to look at data. And this book will give you the habits that beget more good ideas and allow […]
According to Morgan Giddings, creator of popular grant-writing resources and courses, you misunderstand the level at which you need to appeal to reviewers at study section. While you may think you’re speaking from the cerebral/rational (primate) part of your brain to the equivalent area of theirs, that’s not actually the level they’re paying attention on. […]
I despise the term “work-life balance.” The semantics evoke work and life as opposing forces locked in conflict – the bobbing bar of a doomed tightrope walker, a teeter-totter whose fulcrum defies equilibrium. Because we rarely talk of achieving balance, it is also code for inevitable failure or guilt. I propose an alternative. Life encompasses work. […]