Want someplace to go at Evolution 2014 after regularly scheduled events? Check out my map of downtown Raleigh!

After attending a few large professional conferences, you start to realize that some of the best ideas happen after the scheduled events of the meeting, when folks head off to restaurants and bars to socialize into the wee hours of the morning. I also know how challenging it can be to find someplace suitable when you're just a visitor in a city. The Evolution 2014 website does a great job of highlighting  local restaurants for during the day, but I thought it would be nice to have a reference for late-night socializing (which may or may not include drinking some of the wonderful local beer North Carolina has to offer).

Luckily, I've lived in the RDU area long enough to be able to recommend a few places. I compiled these locations in a handy google map (color-coded red), including the location of the conference center (black), conference housing (yellow), and NESCent/area universities (for reference, in green). I put a screenshot below, but click on the link and you can select each marker for the website (hours, events, etc) as well as a way to estimate distance from wherever you are. I included a variety of establishments: bars with good food, dive bars, LGBTQ-friendly places, and even a basement whiskey bar. If you know the area and want someplace added, drop me a note! Finally, and I hope this is obvious: this resource is in no way endorsed by the conference or NESCent…it's just my attempt to help make your trip a little more fun and relaxing.

Downtown Raleigh after hours

Rebranding scientists: rock stars and princesses

Given my recent (and successful!) job search, I've thought a lot over the last several months about how I'm perceived as a scientist. My musings generally relate to how I explain my own expertise to my peers, both within subfields and to a broader set of academics. There was a certain amount of image revamping involved in my switch from plant systematics as a graduate student to more comparative genomics as a postdoc, and I spent a little time researching methods for effective professional rebranding. For example, I've found it valuable to think about how a professional bioinformaticist spends their time, and made sure I took classes, talked to people, and got a GitHub account. These things are useful as professional development, but also necessary to include on a CV and in other resources, to show that I know what I'm talking about.

While traveling recently, I came across a rather large advertisement in an airport which represents a much more dramatic attempt at rebranding the professional image of scientists. The Geoffrey Beene Rock Stars of Science program has been around a few years, and is aimed at promoting cancer research by bringing together scientists and rock stars. I don't know much more about it than that. Perhaps it was my lack of sleep or travel weariness, but it struck me as a rather comical attempt to merge the high-profile, devil-may-care attitude of the rock world with the meticulous, potentially life-changing realm of cancer research. I was left wondering about the main goal of this attempted merger. More importantly, I pondered what journal I could convince to publish my glam-rock album cover in their next issue.

The effect of this ad struck home when I started to think about larger patterns of how these professions individually are perceived by the public. The union of popular music with philanthropy is not new, and neither is an attempt to show scientists are more diverse than just balding, aging white men who wear lab coats and eyeglasses. I've had a number of articles kicking around my "To Write" list for awhile which address the phenomenon of Princess Scientists, or the representation of scientists who are also beauty queens, cheerleaders, and otherwise covered in lipstick and glitter. Given my choice of Princess Tradescantia as a blog title, the resulting debate is one I've followed with reluctant albeit vested interest. The opinions range from vehemently opposing the princess/scientist mashup to a more thoughtful piece by Stephanie Schuttler, one of my friends from graduate school. She contends that using conventionally feminine imagery to attract girls to science isn't necessarily a bad thing. I concur. To me, the only requirement for being a scientist is for someone to actually think about science. The main point is to eliminate additional expectations while simultaneously allowing for other identities, be it rock star, princess, or whatever your imagination desires.


At the end of the day, I still tend to prefer representations of scientists which encourage the full diversity of outside interests. A good example is This Is What A Scientist Looks Like. It's been awhile since the last update, but it's nice to look through and see scientists pursuing myriad activities, from painting to acting. Encouraging this type of plurality is especially important because of the intersectionality between this type of identity inclusion with acceptance of social, gender, sexuality, and racial minorities.

My identity includes scientist. It also includes fiber artist (knitter/spinner/etc), queer, and science fiction aficionado, among many other recurrent interests. Sometimes that includes princess, and that's OK. I couldn't find a picture of myself in full princess regalia, so please settle for this paltry offering of my wearing a silly hat. It has a little bit of shimmer, so hopefully that will suffice.

Even among big trees, I stare at the ground.

I flew out to California a few weeks back to meet my sister and mom for a road trip up to Reno for my brother's graduation. First off, congrats to Dr. Thomas J. Hertweck for completing his PhD in English (Literature and Environment) from the University of Nevada, Reno! I was pleased to be able to meet some of the other fantastic folks in his department, and am hoping to be able to collaborate on some Hertweck & Hertweck publications in the future. Although Tom professes to be "traditional" and eschews official obligations to social media, I know he still frequently lurks the interwebs…so good job, big bro.

Sequoia sempervirens, or redwood trees

While out west, I convinced my family to traipse around a few parks so I could fit in a little botanizing. The highlight was Calaveras Big Tree State Park. You're probably not surprised that there were some pretty big trees. There is only one species of sequoia (a commonly used name in the vernacular), which belongs to the genus Sequoia, and is also known as coastal redwood or just redwood. Redwoods belong to the sequoia subfamily of the cypress family. There are lots of other species of cypress, but redwoods are the only sequoias…other related species are long extinct.

Glad to get the tree taxonomy off my chest! Turns out this trip was a good way to torment educate my family about botany.


Come to find out, even when I'm walking in a forest with some of the tallest trees around, I still tend to look down. Sometimes it's because a downward gaze lets you appreciate the size of these trees. 

Mostly, though, I'm looking nearer towards the ground because I get distracted by flowers. Sometimes they're pretty similar to the plants I see back east. I've placed some tentative species names with the pictures below, but it's really half-assed botanizing at best (hey, I was on vacation).

Dicentra formosa, Pacific bleeding heart. Bleeding hearts are found all over the place, but this local species had nice pink flowers (I'm a sucker for them)

Trillium chloropetalum, giant wakerobin (indeed, it was quite large, the size of a dinner plate!)

Smilacina stellata, false Solomon's seal (widespread, the same one I see on the east coast!)

I'll admit it…I really don't care about identifying trees from Rosaceae.

Corallorhiza striata, an orchid (!)

And sometimes I come across really cool saprophytic plants! Saprophtyes are plants which obtain their nutrients from dead and decaying material on a forest floor. Here's a pretty nice explanation of them (with more gratuitous plant pics) from a carnivorous plant website (because weird plants gotta stick together, ya know?). These types of plants are particularly near and dear to my heart because I talk about them in a manuscript I'm currently revising for publication. Really cool evolutionary stuff!

Sarcodes sanguinea, snow plant, a saprophyte from the heath/blueberry family

I'm not gonna lie. I always feel pretty special when I see a saprophytic plant in the wild, and I think it's mostly just because they're so weird. Not green? Not a problem! Still a plant. I'm sure I'll wax philosophical about these and other topics again in the near future.

Data management and maturing as a scientist.

I attended an awesome workshop last week called Data Carpentry. I briefly mentioned my attendance at a Software Carpentry Bootcamp a few years back, and suffice it to say that I was really excited for another two days of computational bootcamping. I even made a quick little Storify of a few of my tweets if you'd care to take a gander at some highlights.

I've spent quite a bit of time in my professional life learning to manage, analyze, and interpret data. In the 10+ years I've been conducting scientific research, my thought processes about how I relate to data have changed markedly.

1. When I first started learning how to sequence data as an undergraduate, I thought the hardest part of science was collecting data, mostly because that's how I spent most of my time.
2. As I started graduate school, I thought the hardest part of science was getting started on a research project. No doubt this was due in part to my adventures trying to collect plants for my dissertation.
3. As I finished my PhD, I decided the hardest part of science was communicating scientific results to get them published, largely because I was being indoctrinated with publications demonstrating my value as a scientist.
4. During the first part of my postdoc, I thought the hardest part was analyzing data. This is also unsurprising, as my work now is entirely computational (no data collection).
5. The current iteration of my maturation as a scientist? I think the hardest part of science is keeping track of everything you've done and making it accessible to the rest of the community. It's a concept that encapsulates most of the previous "hardest parts," and while it doesn't often deliver tangible rewards like lines of code, pretty figures, or publications, it's satisfying and essential in its own way. Moreover, my career as a data vulture relies on the community's ability to maintain reproducible, open science.

Anyway, that's why I'm so excited about learning better ways to build/query databases, share code, and maintain data. 

Adventures in transitioning from post-doc to professor.

It's that time of year. After dwelling in an esoteric professional purgatory for a few months, I can finally start to visualize where my career will be heading when my time as a post-doc has ended.

In my case, I'm happy to say I'll be joining the Biology Department at the University of Texas at Tyler as assistant professor. My time here at NESCent prepared me well for hitting the job market, but now I'm faced with actually making decisions that up until now were exclusively hypothetical. What is my 5 year research plan? How will I find students? What kind of desk chair should I buy?

I would say that you should expect my blogging to take on a slightly different flavor, but I'm confident in my ability to maintain a consistently inconsistent theme as always. As a quick preview, I'll be thinking lots over the next few months about how to set up computational resources, building collaborations, and teaching things like genomics and bioinformatics. On a more personal level, I'll be contemplating moving across the country, the quasi-nation-state of Texas, and how to explain to my new colleagues that I'll be knitting during faculty meetings.

Onward, towards adventure!

Failure, storytelling, and science.

It's been quiet around here at Princess Tradescantia lately, but I'm excited to report back with a few of my recent adventures!

In January I had an opportunity to participate in a storytelling event co-sponsored by some fantastic folks: The Monti, UNC's Morehead Planetarium, and Scientists with Stories (SwS). The event was called #ScienceFail, and each storyteller shared an experience regarding failure and our careers in science. If you're so inclined, watch this video to learn a bit more about the event and SwS's associated research.

The story I told was from my graduate career; I wrote a bit about it a few years back (I bleed for my thesis: Part I).  I met with Jeff Polish from The Monti several times to craft the details of the narrative, and found the process to be both amusing and intense. The quick version of the story is that I wrecked my truck while doing fieldwork. A longer version of the story can be heard below. The longest version of the story is one I'm still developing, as the repercussions of the events I describe still affect how I pursue my career and think about science. I could write numerous posts about how stories and science reciprocally inform each other, and I'm very grateful to have been afforded the opportunity to participate.

You can also head over to the SoundCloud page to hear the rest of the stories told that night.

Knitting and Science: Molecules!

I thought it was time to take another look at geeky knitting, this time moving away from organisms and more towards molecular biology.

Chromosome hat, Ravelry project,  pattern

I think this hat would be awesome with the chromosomes knit in different colors to mimic the look of chromosome painting (fluorescent in situ hybridization). Ideally, the hat would be black, the chromosomes in blue (DAPI staining), and small dots of green/red/etc embroidered on later…

Genome socks, Ravelry project

The pattern for these socks is actually called "Genome," given the lovely cable twining up the front. I spun the yarn, too, from some lovely wool hand dyed with organic dyes (I'll be talking a  bit more about spinning and dyeing before long!).

DNA scarf,  Ravelry project,  pattern

Finally, a slightly less stylized cable interpretation of a DNA helix, this time in scarf form. There are some really beautiful projects from this same pattern that include color-coding of base pairs.

Other posts in the Knitting and Science series: 

Animals

Plants

Knitbot