Category Archives: academia

Chronicle Vitae: Thanks to mentors

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In the field with my dissertation advisor, Olle Pellmyr (centre) and collaborator Will Godsoe. (Flickr: jby)

In the field during the first year of my Ph.D. research with my dissertation advisor, Olle Pellmyr (centre) and collaborator Will Godsoe (left). (Flickr: jby)

Over at Vitae, I’m contemplating an appropriate topic for the week of U.S. Thanksgiving: how much I owe to the many senior colleagues who’ve mentored me over the course of my scientific career.

In graduate school and as a postdoc, I’ve been exceptionally fortunate in my formal and informal relationships with senior colleagues. As I’m nearing (I hope) the day when I will begin teaching, training graduate students, and supervising postdocs myself, I’ve tried to keep track of specific ways that my mentors have aided me. It’s helped me define what I want to do as a mentor myself, but it’s also good, I think, to remember how much my career has depended on others’ support.

No, I don’t know why the piece is illustrated by men carrying turkeys, apart from the seasonal connection. Maybe the men are mentors and the turkeys are mentees? Maybe just go read the whole column and don’t over-think it.

Chronicle Vitae: Why the tenure track job hunt sucks — and why it maybe ought to?

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(Flickr: Alison Curtis)

(Flickr: Alison Curtis)

In a new post for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae blog today, I let off a little of the steam accumulated over four years (and counting) of writing applications for tenure-track faculty jobs.

Do you really need to receive letters of reference with my application? Yes, of course, you want perspectives on candidates from people who have worked with us in the past. Will you use their letters in the very first round of sorting through dozens (or hundreds) of applicants? Probably not. I have met a few faculty members who tell me that they do read letters for that first-stage decision — but those professors are the rare, possibly superhuman, exceptions. For candidates, making sure letters get delivered means making sure that three-to-five usually very busy senior collaborators know the general description of the job opening in question, the idiosyncratic method by which letters should be submitted, and the deadline for submission — then following up to ensure they meet that deadline.

I’d like to think this column is both a (reasonable) extended complaint, and a #SlatePitch-y rebuttal to said complaint — because I kinda think, actually, that as maddening as tenure-track applications can be, they might be pretty good at identifying people who will do well as faculty. To find out why, go read the whole thing.

Chronicle Vitae: What is a postdoc?

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(Library of Congress: C.H. Kidurell)

Vitae totally found a picture of an old-time scientist with exactly my haircut. (Library of Congress: C.H. Kidurell)

Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Vitae site, I’m contemplating my own job description.

In the four years since I finished my doctorate, I’ve done at least another Ph.D.’s-worth of work on questions that, back in graduate school, I would never have thought I could tackle. I’ve been lucky — I landed a good postdoc on an interesting project with a mentor who gave me freedom to pursue just about anything I thought would be valuable. That is all exactly what I would want to do running my own lab as a principal investigator, with a faculty appointment. And isn’t that what I’m “training” to do, after all?

It ends up being, as you might expect, as much about the prospects for something to do after being a postdoc as the postdoc itself — but for that, you should go read the whole thing.

Queer in STEM survey of LGBTQ science professionals now published

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The first peer-reviewed paper from the Queer in STEM survey of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer scientists, engineers, and research professionals is now online ahead of print in the Journal of Homosexuality. It’s the first big, nationwide study of LGBTQ career experiences in the sciences — a potentially important resource to inform the policies of scientific employers and professional organizations.

Some of the most important points in the paper, which I wrote with collaborator Allison Mattheis, are

  • There are a lot of LGBTQ folks working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) — we had more than 1400 responses from STEM professionals across the United States, and in several other countries. (Edited to add: Does this mean LGBTQ folks are well represented, as a proportion of everyone working in STEM? We can’t tell from this dataset — but that’s something we hope to work on in a follow-up study.)
  • Most survey participants reported being completely open about their LGBTQ identity with their friends and family, but a large subset of them were not open at all with their colleagues or coworkers. (This is similar to the results of a survey of U.S. workers released by the Human Rights Campaign last year.)
  • Participants were more likely to be open to their colleagues or coworkers if they described their workplace as safe and welcoming.
  • Participants were more likely to be open to their colleagues or coworkers if they worked in a STEM field with better representation of women (see the figure below). This suggests that in fields with poor gender balance, the climate may be less comfortable for anyone who fails to conform to a straight male gender presentation.
Queer in STEM participants were more likely to be open to colleagues if they worked in STEM fields with better representation of women, as estimated from the U.S. National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) report. Regression with all STEM fields (solid line), p = 0.31; with Psychology excluded (dashed line), p = 0.02.

Queer in STEM participants were more likely to be open to colleagues if they worked in STEM fields with better representation of women, as estimated from the U.S. National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) report. Regression with all STEM fields (solid line), p = 0.31;
with Psychology excluded (dashed line), p = 0.02.

You can find the full paper on the website of the Journal of Homosexuality, or download an easier-to-read PDF copy of the manuscript here.

New place, new project

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Lodgepole Pine, Pinus contorta

Lodgepole pine, up close. (Flickr: J. Maughn)

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve accepted a new postdoctoral position as part of the AdapTree project at the University of British Columbia, starting in mid-August. The work I’ll be doing with AdapTree is a dramatic extension of the landscape genomic research I’ve done with Medicago truncatula, studying the genetic basis of adaptation to different environmental conditions. For AdapTree, the focal species are lodgepole pine — Pinus contorta ssp. latifolia — and two species of spruce — Picea glauca, P. engelmanni, and hybrids between them. Using genetic data from thousands of trees at hundreds of sites across British Columbia and Alberta, and growth and performance measurements in big climate-controlled experiments, I’ll get to help figure out what it all means for the future of northern forests.

Apart from the sheer awesomeness of the data, it’s going to be fantastic working with the AdapTree collaborators, which include many biologists whose work I’ve long known and admired: Sally Aitken, Michael Whitlock, Loren Rieseberg, Jason Holliday, Katie Lotterhos, and Sam Yeaman, among others. On top of all that, I get to do it at UBC, one of the premier North American universities for evolutionary ecology, and in Vancouver, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited. Really, this will be a return to the northern Pacific coast community of biologists where I “grew up” as a graduate student at the University of Idaho, but I’ll be coming back with four years of great experience and learning from my time at Minnesota.

I can’t wait to get started.

An open letter to Jack Andraka, the Advocate, and, what the hell, OUT magazine while I’m at it

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A Rainbow of Tubes

(Flickr: BlueRidgeKitties)

Jack,

I think I speak for the every gay science nerd when I say that we’re exceptionally proud to count you among us. The initiative you took, while still a high school student, to join a research lab and design a new rapid test for cancer is incredibly inspiring, and you’ve taken to the role of public advocate for science with aplomb.

So I was disappointed to read your recent op-ed on the website of The Advocate about the lack of queer role models in science — not because you’re wrong about the problem, but because you missed a big opportunity to start fixing it.

Continue reading →

Manhattan is a great drama about the problems of science careers

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Two bodies: Liza Winter (Olivia Williams) and Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) are both Ph.D. scientists—but only Frank works in a field useful to the Project. (WGN America)

Two bodies: Liza Winter (Olivia Williams) and Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) are both Ph.D. scientists—but only Frank works in a field useful to the Project. (WGN America)

Some of the best dramatic fantasies project otherwise commonplace struggles and worries into extraordinary circumstances. Make that awkward teenage girl a vampire slayer, and put her in a high school that is literally built over a gateway to Hell. How do we feel about that military occupation if it’s reimagined as humans subjugated by their out-of-control cybernetic creations? A love affair is a lot more compelling if it involves the President of the United States and the woman who helped fix his election. So maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the most compelling television show about the daily drama of academic science is a historical drama about building the first atomic bomb.

Manhattan, which airs on WGN America and streams on Hulu, follows physicists designing what will become the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, starting about two years before August 6, 1945. The project staff and their families are living in a laboratory campus built and hyper-secured by the U.S. military in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, but in many respects they could be working at any research university today. Here’s my (spoiler-y) list of the parallels, which are sometimes dangerously on-the-nose:

Continue reading →

I read a book!

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Scheikundeles / Chemistry class Chemistry lab. Photo by Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands.

It’s called Making Scientists: Six Principles for Effective College Teaching (buy it over on Indiebound). It’s about teaching science to undergraduates, which is a thing I’ve been trying to do, lately. And I wrote a review for ProfHacker.

In their new book Making Scientists: Six Principles for Effective College Teaching, (Harvard University Press, $24.95) Light and Micari argue that undergraduate education in the sciences should go beyond imparting a basic set of knowledge, and make learning science more like the experience of doing scientific research.

If teaching science to undergraduates is also a thing you do, may I suggest you go read the whole thing?◼

First teaching experience: Final examination

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2013.01.05 - Reem-Kayden Center The Reem-Kayden Center for Science, Bard College. Photo by jby.

Twenty-one days, 12 schooldays, 24 class periods, 54 hours of class time … and now the 2013 Citizen Science course at Bard College, my first attempt at teaching all on my own is over. Actually, it’s been over for a couple days. I’ve flown back to Minneapolis, unpacked two suitcases full of laundry and books, spent a day at the office picking up the threads of work I left behind for a month, cleaned and restocked the kitchen, and posted photos from my weekend off in New York City.

Oh, and submitted the final grades.

But so now that it’s all over, how’d it go? Pretty well, on the overall. As much as Citizen Science is meant to be a crash course in scientific reasoning for Bard’s first-year students, it’s also a crash course in teaching for folks like me, who come to the job with experience as teaching assistants, but not in planning or executing a whole course. And judged solely on that level, Citizen Science is amazing.

Let me run through the numbers again: 12 four-and-a-half-hour days with the same 20 first-year students. I spent a fair bit of my Christmas holiday preparing lesson plans, and ended up reworking almost all of that planning in the last three days before class started. From there on, the average workday was something like:

  • 0700-0800h: Wake, shower, breakfast at cafeteria.
  • 0800-0900h: Last-minute lesson prep; classroom set-up, maybe some frantic final copy-making.
  • 0900-1130h: Morning class period. Ideally, no more than one hour of this is PowerPoint presentations and/or videos of TED talks.
  • 1130-1200h: Clean up, collect oneself, wait for the crush of students to move through the cafeteria.
  • 1200-1300h: Lunch at the cafeteria.
  • 1300-1500h: Afternoon class period. Only start this with a video if you want everyone to immediately fall asleep. Class debates are good in this time slot. Assign homework for the next day.
  • 1500-1600h: Clean up, collect oneself, adjust tomorrow’s plans based on what you covered today.
  • 1600-1730h: Exercise. (There’s a respectable campus gym, or nice trails if the weather’s not terrible.)
  • 1730-1900h: Dinner at the cafeteria.
  • 1900-whenever it’s done. Lesson planning and prep; printing and copying of handouts.
  • 2300h: Bedtime, one hopes.

With variations for a four-day rotation in the wet lab and another in the computer lab, plus a “civic engagement” day in which the first-year students go to a local public school to guest-teach science classes for half a day, that’s pretty much the shape of the course. It was exhausting. Boot camp for college teaching. Learning to swim by jumping into the middle of the Hudson River in January.

But that schedule leaves out a multitude of support. First and foremost, Citizen Science faculty have no other personal responsibility than the teaching. Meals are in the campus cafeteria, which provides just fine. Housing is on campus—yes, my dorm room was tiny and ill-equipped, but it was also right around the corner from my classrooms, the communal faculty workspace, the cafeteria, and the gym. So: no cooking, no commute.

Also, it must be said, the Bard student body is pretty great. There were the inevitable exceptions, but most of my class section were smart, friendly, and willing to at least try to tackle any topic I threw at them. Sometimes they were alarmingly informal, and I had to bend a little to accomodate the local concept of punctuality, but if a classroom full of unknown students is a cliff from which a rookie prof dives, these students were also the trampoline at the bottom.

But most importantly, Citizen Science teaching is collaborative. Intensely collaborative. From the moment I arrived on campus, most of my conversations with other faculty members were about lesson plans: what had worked last year, what spurred an amazing class discussion earlier today, what part of the lab procedure left every student confused and irritated. We all started with a six-inch-thick binder of readings, case studies, and worksheets, and then added our own ideas—and swapped, reworked, cut, and rejiggered each other’s ideas.

2013.01.14 - Running Running the campus trails. Photo by jby.

For me, the flagship example of this was the computer lab. The resource binder had some material on SIR models of disease spread in a population; I wanted to try and teach my students some of the programming language R. So why not build SIR simulations in R?

One faculty member had already developed a nifty interactive model of disease spread in a simulated social network, which included many of the basic concepts necessary to understand more general models, so I started the computer section with that. Next up was an intro-to-R worksheet I’d banged out over the holidays, which covered exactly the programming concepts necessary to code the model, and nothing more. A couple of other faculty members test-drove that worksheet in their own class sections, which had the computer lab earlier in the schedule than mine.

One night’s reading assignment was Anderson and May (1979) [PDF], the original SIR paper; the next day we walked through the math in class. Then I gave my students a worksheet covering some of the graphing capabilities of R, which another of the R-using faculty had developed as followup to my introduction worksheet. And finally, I walked them through the coding necessary to create a simple SIR recursion simulation, complete with a plot of populaiton dynamics over time.

The result wasn’t unqualified success, by a long shot. Some students bogged down in the programming; many glazed over when I started writing equations on the whiteboard. Almost everyone seemed to like drawing graphs in R, though a lot of folks got frustrated by the technicalities of programming syntax even in that context. In the end, most students were able to at least follow me through coding the SIR model, but that was all we had time to do. Given another go-around, I’d provide more structure in the final stretch, with a worksheet that walks through the model coding and how to use the finished model to test specific hypotheses about epidemic dynamics. Also, I’d probably lead with the graph-making, which was more engaging than just pushing variables around on the command line.

But on the whole, I think it worked. My students coded SIR simulations in R, which actually responded to parameter changes the way they were supposed to, and generated pretty graphs in the process. Several students even told me, afterward, that they’ll use R for graphing in the future.

That outcome was really only possible because there were other faculty working on similar ideas, testing things out for me, sharing their own experience and materials. From what I hear, that’s a resource I can’t expect to have when I start teaching my own “real” courses as a full-fledged faculty member. And yet it’s the biggest reason why Citizen Science left me feeling like, actually, I might be able to pull off this whole professor-ing thing after all.◼