Departmental holiday parties, then and now.

My PhD advisor, Chris Pires, sent me this picture via email a few days ago. It's the two of us at our first holiday party at University of Missouri, during my first year of graduate school in 2005. I think we won trivia or something, and got an awesome grab bag of "prizes" that included slightly broken garden shears?

Picture courtesy of Melody Kroll

My first UT Tyler Dept of Biology holiday party was today at lunch. I must not have really changed much over the last decade, because I still took leftover food (mainly dessert, because priorities). I'm also dressed a bit better than in the picture above, not necessarily because my fashion sense has changed, but so I can go to commencement tonight. I haven't participated in commencement since I graduated from high school (although I did attend my big brother's Ph.D graduation last spring). Onwards and upwards!

Now if only I could finish my class plan for bioinformatics next semester...

Geeking out about acorns on the local news.

My university has a pretty decent relationship with the local news. Reporters fairly frequently contact the public relations office, seeking out an authority (i.e., professor) on the topic of the story they're preparing. A few folks in my department appear in news stories on a semi-regular basis, mostly offering facts and opinions on issues tangentially related to their areas of expertise.

I wasn't entirely surprised, therefore, when I got a phone call from the public relations office a few days ago, asking if I'd be willing to talk to a reporter. I was initially apprehensive, as I'm still trying to get my bearings in my new home state and wasn't sure I wanted to be put on the spot if asked about something controversial. I had no need for fear, though: I'd been recommended as someone who could talk about why it was there seemed to be such a large acorn crop this year.

"Heck yeah!" I thought, and calmly agreed to meet with the reporter that afternoon. I spent a few minutes doing a quick literature search. As I suspected, there's a decent amount of literature on that very topic. I made a list of talking points, including a few general notes about plant biology/ecology:

1. Acorns are the fruit of the oak tree, created by the fertilization of a female flower by pollen from a male flower.
2. Multiple factors can affect the development of an acorn, including how many flowers of each type are produced, effectiveness of pollination, and whether the tree has resources to dedicate to developing lots of fruits.
3. The factors above are, in turn, dependent on temperature, amount of sunlight, and levels of precipitation.
4. Acorn production (masting) also varies temporally (through years), spatially (across geography), and by species (some oak species produce more/larger acorns).
5. This summer has been particularly cool and wet compared to the past (I checked average temperature and precipitation for the month of July for 2011-2014), so perhaps those conditions favor more acorn production.
6. Trees are large and can't move, so resource allocations from previous years can affect acorn production in subsequent years.

The interview took about 15 minutes. We went outside and stood near some conveniently located oaks near my building. Of course, the talking points I had planned were shuffled around and reframed depending on the questions he asked, but I think I covered everything listed above and more (acorns are food for wildlife, they do eventually grow into trees, etc). Then the reporter grabbed a totally awkward shot of me walking down a path looking at leaves.

It's totally cringe worthy, but I know at least my dad will want the link, so you can see how my talking points above translated into the final story here: KLTV News, Why so many acorns this fall?

Lessons learned: keep makeup and a blazer in my office, to prepare for next time. Be a more careful about preparing appropriate sound-bites. I was also surprised to learn how much trouble the reporter had getting someone to talk to him about this; a number of arborists in town completely blew him off. I thought it was super cool! That's probably a good thing, because the public relations representative said at the end of the interview, "Great! I can add you to the list to talk about plant stuff!"

Great, indeed. Let's call this "service to the university." 

A catalysis meeting on long term experimental evolution.

Travel makes it easy to let blog posts slip away without being fully formed, written, and posted. Now that the semester is winding down, I'm going to try and follow through with writing the backlog of posts that have been piling up from my adventures over the last few weeks. Today's report is about the first part of my trip back to NESCent and North Carolina the week before Thanksgiving.

The catalysis meeting I attended on long term experimental evolution (you can read a little more about the meeting and participants here) was not only fantastic but also the last NESCent will host (more on this in a later post). Although the topic is outside of my main research interests, I answered the solicitation to participate in this meeting because of some research I've been doing with Joe Graves, Michael Rose and colleagues on experimentally evolved Drosophila populations. Moreover, there seem to be some really interesting opportunities to explore robustness of analytical methods using experimental evolution data, which is of particular interest to me.

Here are the things I found compelling about this meeting:

1. Meeting organizers set the tone. Rob Lanfear, the main organizer, put together a fantastic webpage and started a Mendeley group so we could share literature beforehand.
2. The participants were diverse. Forty four percent of attendees were female. There were graduate students, postdocs, early career scientists, and senior researchers present, and folks came from all over the world. Model systems included microbes, invertebrates, fish and trees. 
3. We capitalized on the group's diversity. As an early career scientist, I was pleased to develop relationships with a number of other folks starting faculty jobs at similar institutions. As a group, I was gratified to hear well-respected, senior scientists describing junior scientists' research as "brilliant." There were multiple types of interactions incorporated into the meetings such that folks who were hesitant to speak in full-group discussions could still contribute ideas. In short, this meeting exhibited many aspects of scientific discourse that are overlooked, but which I value deeply.
4. Attendees were invested in the meeting itself. Part of the meeting was structured (or perhaps more accurately, unstructured) as an "unconference," with participants determining topics for talks and group discussions on the fly. Despite this free-form format, folks in this group were very interested in talking about broader research ideas, rather than pushing their own agendas.

I left the meeting with a much wider and deeper understanding of experimental evolution as an active field of research, as well as a better grasp on different ways of thinking about the process of science and its limitations. I was also grateful to participate in one last meeting of this type at NESCent...stay tuned for my next post to hear more about that!

How did I get here? Learning to love research.

I grew up in southern Indiana, in an area stuck mid-way between small town and big city (Evansville). I thought biology and music were both pretty cool in high school. I applied to colleges in a haphazard way, auditioning on flute for some schools, and checking out biology programs at others. I eventually ended up at Western Kentucky University, mostly because of the generous academic scholarship they offered me and the WKU Forensics (Speech and Debate) team. I had competed in high school, and had lots of friends who were also on the team, so it seemed like fun thing to do. After spending so much time my first semester practicing, traveling, and competing for speech, I declared my major in my second semester as something like "corporate and organizational communications," although I really lacked an understanding of what a job in such a field would entail. I stuck with a minor in biology, since I'd already taken a semester of introductory classes. My reasoning for this adjustment was that, although biology was interesting, I didn't want to be a doctor. Moreover, I literally couldn't imagine spending years of my life working on the same biological research question. 

That spring, I went to a departmental seminar for biology because I thought it sounded interesting. My professor for introductory biology, Larry Alice, saw me there and suggested I start working for him doing research. Not one to balk at offered opportunities, I relented and started learning how to sequence DNA to determine the evolutionary relationships among species of grass. It only took a semester of actually performing research to realize how gratifying it can be. I switched my major to biology within a few months, this time keeping communications (and also history) as minors.

Casting a wide net.

I was fortunate as a post-doc at NESCent to have a huge community of like-minded scholars to help me develop intellectually. I'm still very fortunate to be surrounded by folks doing awesome research, but I was hired specifically to fill a missing niche (bioinformatics) in the department. That means I need to work extra hard to find ways to connect with my new students and colleagues. While my skills are definitely desired and I have lots to contribute, many things I'm doing simply haven't been done here before, so I'm thinking creatively about how to fit in on campus. I'm doing my best to think broadly (cast a wide net), while at the same time focusing my time and energy on tasks that will have an impact (and hopefully catch a few big fish).

The benefit of working as a bioinformaticist is that I can work with anyone who has data (hint: that means pretty much everyone). My specialty as a genomicist also makes me well suited for the emerging interests of other folks on campus. I've been sitting down to talk to lots of folks about opportunities for collaboration on such projects. It's incredibly interesting to learn about different model systems, and gratifying to know that I can contribute to such a breadth of projects. At the very least, I can save folks time by providing a bit of information in current genome assembly methods, for instance.

It's easy enough to work with folks in other science departments, but I've been casting an even wider net. I was delighted when a friend from the history department came over for a chat about filtering data. He had a large digital dataset of documents and was looking through them for a particular type of data. Luckily, that type of data was always described with a particular string of text. Three lines of bash scripting later, and we managed to save him days of work. I've long been interested in these broad approaches to academia, and even attended a THATCamp meeting at NCState several months back. My brain works best when building connections between seemingly disparate ideas, so a little bit of my time in pursuing small projects like that helps keep me happy.

The unexpected returns are also nice: getting to know folks over in nursing, for example, let me know about better ways to teach in ways for which they are distinguished: applied methods (for which bioinformatics certainly applies) as well as online classes. At the risk of extending the metaphor too far, casting a wide net is making the fishing expedition of research and academia more appealing to me.

Value judgements and scientific results.

As scientists, we like to think that we are objective in the interpretation of data. As humans, our personal value-based judgments creep into these assessments far more than we might realize. I often think of these biases in my career, both as a researcher (when writing papers or reviewing manuscripts) but also as an educator.

I mentioned at the beginning of the semester that I'm obligated to watch student presentations for a class on science communication. As the semester progresses, I'm getting a better handle on how students (at least in our department) are starting to think about scientific arguments. A few students have made what are, at least to me, surprising statements about the strengths and weaknesses of the primary literature they discuss: they relate that failure of results to support a hypothesis is a weakness of the paper (also vice versa, that "supporting the hypothesis" is a strength).

One of the first lessons I learned while doing scientific research is that (more often than not) unexpected results and questions can emerge from our experiments. You can learn something from any experiment, even if it's simply a better way to perform the experiment in the future. Unfortunately, research on science research (I know, so meta) indicates that results which fail to support the hypothesis are often discarded by researchers as "useless" or "no good" (you can read more about this phenomenon in association with the formation of the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine here). Albeit unfortunate, this behavior makes sense in the face of the competitive realm of science research, where a nice, concise story can make the difference between publishing or wallowing in academic purgatory.

It gives me pause, however, when students indicate such a value preference for results that support a hypothesis. In my mind, results aren't "good" or "bad," they simply...are. Is devaluation of negative results innate in our educational mindset? On the other hand, students vocalizing negative results as a weakness of the paper may be more semantic than scientific; for example, students aren't nuancing their argument to discuss particular experimental drawbacks, which is a completely justifiable concern. Alternatively, they might just be saying what they think we (the instructors) want to hear, and hoping we'll give them points for covering all the required topics listed on the rubric.

Regardless of the direct causes of such reasoning, I'm going to be keeping an eye (ear?) on such comments as I continue developing classes. When operating in isolation, these judgements about the value of results can be a starting point to some interesting discussions about epistemology and hypothesis testing. More often, though, these mindsets work in concert with other scientific misconceptions, which can result in huge problems for me as an educator. Fortunately, there are sections in my bioinformatics class that I'm explicitly developing so we can have discussions about whether the results we're obtaining are accurate and meaningful. I'm looking forward to embedding these higher-level reasoning skills into the regular content of the class.

The art of asking in science.

I posted some love for Neil Gaiman's spoken words a few weeks back, so it only seems fitting that I follow up with inspiration from his partner, Amanda Palmer. She did a TED talk (the video is slightly NSFW at 10:49) last year that explored the relationship between artist and fan, emphasizing that we need to think less about how to make people pay for music and more about how to let them. She relates that asking people to help us is hard because it makes us feel vulnerable and shameful, but that asking for help can also create a profound connection with other people that allows a mutually beneficial transaction to occur. But watch the TED talk...she says it much better than I ever could.

I am not a professional artist or musician, but life in the ivory tower of academia does not shield me from the need to reach out to other people. I'm lucky that I don't have to ask people for financial help to pay my bills, but there are plenty of other circumstances in which my professional success rests on my ability to appeal to other people for assistance.

Learning to ask other people for help was a major stepping stone for me during graduate school, as I realized the need for assistance in troubleshooting lab techniques, designing experiments, and proofreading papers. As an assistant professor, asking for help is becoming even more of an art. I wouldn't be able to navigate the logistical issues of university bureaucracy without running to the office next door every few days. I belong to a small department, so connecting with other academic units on campus and at other schools is important to have access to resources for teaching and research. An important part of my job right now is applying for grants, which is really just another way of saying "asking for money to fund my research." Some scientists are taking an even more Amanda-style approach to paying for research by launching crowdfunding campaigns for particular projects. Moreover, my job as a bioinformaticist means I rely on other people for data, so asking for research opportunities is essential. I knew my job would require me to engage in asking, and even persuading, my peers to help me. I'm only starting to realize, however, what it means to ask students for help.

Am I really asking students to help me? That seems counter-intuitive to the stereotypical role of a professor, but indeed, we rely on students to take our classes and do research with us. As a newbie, I can't rely on my reputation to attract students to my class or lab. I have to ask students to consider it (hence my post from a few days ago: Student motivation, AKA please take my class). Sometimes that requires educating students about what I have to offer, like the ability to obtain marketable skills. Moreover, it makes me consider another question Amanda ponders: "Is this fair?" For my job, that means asking whether this student has the capacity to succeed, and whether it will be beneficial for them to spend the time, energy, and money to do so.

Framing my professional, scientific interactions as "asking for help" appeals to me on a fundamental level. It gives me the responsibility of finding the things I need. Moreover, it allows choice and freedom on the part of the audience, whether it's a student wanting to work with me or a funding agency deciding to award a grant. We pursue science because we think the work is interesting, but we're fooling ourselves if we think everyone will innately feel the same. Making an art of asking is a way of starting a conversation, and opens the door to persuade without being overbearing.

There is also a benefit in the act of asking a question. I wouldn't've ended up in graduate school if one of my professors hadn't asked me to consider it, and you certainly have to ask (i.e., apply) to receive a grant. I'm practicing asking questions as way to start a conversation about obtaining the things I need.

Can you fund my research?
Would you like to work on a project together?
Have you thought about going to graduate school?
Are you interested in taking my class?