Time for more blogging! Warming up... You can't believe what you see...

I'm just now coming out of the end-of-semester fog.  I've been through three academic years so far as an assistant professor.  That's six semesters, five in which I've taught a course.  In all five of those semesters, I ran out of steam and could not keep up with all the things I'd have liked to have done in my areas of research, mentoring, teaching, and family.  In my opinion, 16 weeks is too long for a semester...I notice myself and my students beginning to burn out after 8 weeks. 

It's a pattern for me that I take on too much at the beginnings of semesters and then have to cast things aside as I get overwhelmed.  Before this semester I took a big leap into communicating with scientists on the internet, via blogging and discussions with a bunch of new friends on friendfeed.  As the semester engulfed me, I ended up casting aside blogging, but actually was able to maintain a lot of dialogue on friendfeed (e.g. in the Science 2.0 and The Life Scientists room).  So, even though I was disappointed to not keep up the blogging, I can look back and see that overall I made a huge amount of progress in terms of scientific communication and meeting (virtually) many great people around the globe.  I'm very happy with that, and I'm even happier that a couple of my graduate students came along with me.  They have made their own connections with other scientists and made substantial progress in open science and open scientific communication.

I've been excited for the last week or two to ramp up the blogs again.  In particular, I'm excited about a couple things.  One is to try out Research Blogging.  This was suggested to me by Michael Nielsen in a friendfeed thread in which I learned a lot, but which I started by spouting off way too ignorantly.  My apologies to Richard once again!  As I understand it, the service will allow me to write up blog reviews of specific research papers and then label my posts as suitable for listing in Research Blogging.  For me, it will be a step up from what I started doing this semester, which is trying to make a few notes on every paper that I add to citeulike.  You can see my citeulike RSS feed, with my comments added, on this Yahoo pipe.  It will be a lot more work to write what I think is a worthy blog report about a paper, but I'm excited about testing the waters.  The way citeulike is set up, I feel like my comments there are pretty much wasted as far as benefit to others goes.  In the future, I'm expecting my group to communicate more via citeulike (or another service) as a form of "journal watch."  But as it stands now, I'm pretty sure nobody reads the comments I add to my citeulike library.

The other thing that should be exciting is to write a guest blog for Lisa Green at NextBio.  We've talked about this a bit, and I think it may happen in the next few weeks.  What I will blog about that is worthy of a "guest blog," I don't know...but it should be a fun experience!

Finally, I needed some inspiration to come in here and start dusting off my blogs.  I had been a bit depressed at their dormancy, which was a postive feedback loop preventing me from blogging.  A blog warm-up idea came to me earlier tonight as I was staring at the ceiling fan.  I recalled something I'd noticed maybe 6-10 years ago in graduate school, which made me recall something else I'd noticed at the same time.  They're two "illusion" kind of things that I think are fun, and which I'm going to describe here without actually researching them scientifically.  Hopefully someone who knows something will pipe in and tell us something about them!

1. Blurry motion seems slower with peripheral vision

I first noticed this illusion when I was trying to make large graphs in Origin back in graduate school.  Whenever I made the mistaking of clicking on very large matrix plots, the graph would flash for like a minute before opening the graphing preferences window.  I would look aside in frustration each time.  And then I noticed that when I looked at the flashing graph (which was more like quick vertical scrolling of a dark patch), it seemed to scroll much slower in my peripheral vision.  A few years later, I noticed the same thing when looking at a ceiling fan, an experiment much easier to reproduce.

Here is the experiment you can try

Find a ceiling fan that's not too far away, and spinning at about 2 hertz.  When you look at it directly, if you're like me, the default image is to ignore the individual fan blades, and perceive a blur.  You can change the image dramatically by following an individual blade with your eyes.  For me, that motion seems "slower" than the blurry motion, but it's not the illusion I'm talking about here.  The illusion that I see is when you quickly switch from looking at the fan with your central vision and instead use your peripheral vision.  When doing that, the motion seems to slow down substantially.  For me, it is substantial and repeatable.

I couldn't resist checking into this a bit on wikipedia, and I found something called "flicker fusion threshold" in this wikipedia article on peripheral vision.  In the flicker fusion article, it is said, "so flicker can be sensed in peripheral vision at higher frequencies than in foveal vision."  Given this, I wonder if the effect I am seeing has to do with some part of the visual system normalizing a given flicker relative to the maximum possible perceived flicker?  The fan produces a constant rate of flicker...but it is a larger percentage of the fastest possible flicker when looked at with foveal vision?

2.  I think you can hear individual splashes in the roar of a waterfall.
(Photo by Ant J on Flickr.)
This is an experiment I can't replicate easily now that I live in Albuquerque.  We do have waterfalls in the mountains, but it's nothing like when I lived in Ithaca, NY during graduate school.  Almost every day, I would cross the bridge over the waterfall at the end of Beebe Lake.  This was on my way between Clark Hall (the physics building) and A-Lot, the parking lot the bus dropped off at. I would often stop and stare at the falling water. I noticed one day that if I followed with my eyes a particular part of the broken stream from the lake to the point at which it hit the rocks, I could audibly hear it "splash" within the "blurry" roar of the waterfall.

Here is the experiment you can try

If you have access to a waterfall, this experiment isn't too difficult to try.  As I mentioned above in item 1, you can track the blades of a ceiling fan with your eyes, and this is the same thing you need to do with the waterfall.  Track a "patch" of water all the way from the point at which it starts falling to when it hits the rocks or water below.  Keep doing this repeatedly in a cycle, and you should "hear" the individual splashes--or at least I do.  It's also fascinating to just look at the water as it breaks into pieces on the way down.

I just attempted 30 seconds of lazy google research for this phenomenon and was not successful at uncovering a wikipedia article to give insight into this effect.  I am 50% sure it's an auditory illusion, and the other 50% of me thinks, "why not...maybe the sound isn't as 'blurry' as it seems?"  It would be possible to check this with an objective audio/visual recording system.

3. The Blue Field Entoptic Effect -- Mystery Solved!

Also known as Scheerer's phenomenon.  As opposed to the above two illusions, this one I now know what it is.  I first noticed it on airplanes when flying in a really bright sky.  In Albuquerque, we have bright blue skies frequently, and I can see the effect.  According to wikipedia, most people can see what I see in these conditions: counteless point-like bright white things that travel in squiggly paths in the field of vision.  It turns out that these are white blood cells flowing through the capillaries that cover the non-foveal parts of the retina.  On a blue background (e.g. the sky), those capillaries produce very dark lines all across the field of vision--due to red blood cells absorbing blue light very well.  Somewhere in the visual processing system, these dark lines are "edited" out, so we don't perceive them.  However, when a white blood cell travels through, it is mostly transparent, and the increased light is perceived as a tiny white thing in the field of view (which it is, I guess).  One of the most fascinating things to me is that it allows you to actually visualize your own blood cells flowing.  According to the article, some doctors have tried to leverage this as a diagnostic technique.

How to try out the experiment:

This one is easy.  Wait for a nice sunny day.  Pick a big blue patch of the sky and stare at it for a couple minutes.  Keep your attention focused on looking for bright dots appearing and traveling in squiggly paths.  You won't be able to follow individual ones, but by trying to use your peripheral vision,  you can see hundreds or thousands of them.  They are quite different than "floaters."  They are smaller (point-like), quicker, and more fleeting.

4. The McCollough Effect -- An amazing optical illusion

I'm including this one because I realized that I ended up having a common theme of "can you believe your eyes?"  The answer is "no!" apparently.  So, I'm including this final, amazing illusion that is well worth trying out.

How to try out the experiment:

If you have 10 minutes, you should go try out this optical illusion: The McCollough Effect.  Spend the 5 minutes they recommend and then test it out for yourself.  You can read a description of it on wikipedia.  I found this illusion mind boggling, because for me it persisted for DAYS after I'd spent the five minutes training whatever part of my visual system that is being trained.  Just an amazing demonstration of an ability to unwillingly and semi-permanently "program" part of your brain (or visual system at least) just by staring at some images for a few minutes.

Update on Our New Open Science Activities

I think it's been about a month since I started these blogs and joined friendfeed. It's been a whirlwind, really. I've e-met dozens of scientists around the globe in that short time, most of them much farther along than I and my lab are in terms of open science. The community of scientists out "here" is incredibly welcoming and helpful, and I want to send a thank you out to whomever of you read this post.

It's also been a time of huge change in terms of our lab's open science activities. We have started a lot of new open activities, and I thought I would make a list of them here. I'll only list those things that are new since mid-December, and I think it's quite a lot.

Blogging

Of course, I started blogging. We also started a blog that I and our lab members to contribute to. So far, only Anthony and I have contributed to it, but that will evolve over the year, I think. So far for me, blogging is a treat and I've been able to rationalize doing it based on potential synergies with the activities I'm supposed to be doing :)

Posting grants in public

We started posting our grants on Scribd. I chose this site from advice from Jean-Claude Bradley and Cameron Neylon. So far, I've liked the site as a place for sharing grants and other documents and it seems to work well. As an example, here is the grant we submitted last week. Posting grants has been really helpful so far and I expect it to continue to be helpful. We've received helpful comments from a couple people, and also made some science connections because of it. For example, Cameron and I realized we have a lot of science interests in common!

Paper preprint

A big step we took is we drafted our first paper out of our lab and we posted it on Nature Precedings. Larry Herskowitz is the lead author on this paper. We posted it a week ago, and we immediately received very helpful comments, questions, and suggestions from Richard Yeh. We're using OpenWetWare to talk about the paper with Richard and any others who want to join. My opinion right now is that OpenWetWare is a better place for these kinds of detailed lists of questions and suggestions, because we'll easily be able to break it into different topics, create sub-pages, and post supporting data, figures, etc. (In contrast, we found that trying to write the paper on a wiki just did not work for us at all.)

Open research projects

We have also taken some big steps towards "open notebook science" in the past month. We've been using a private wiki for about two years now, hosted by OpenWetWare. As I understand it, providing us with a private wiki was part of an experiment to see if it could draw in more users and lead them towards open science. You can't scientifically extrapolate from our experience, but then again, you don't have to approach it scientifically...so, my opinion is that providing the private wiki worked out beautifully for OWW's mission. I think they should continue to provide private wikis, including for select new users on a trial basis. It's quite possible (impossible to prove, though) that none of the open science activities I'm describing in this post would have been started had not Jason Kelly offered me the private wiki two years ago. Thank you Jason & all the OWW founders! I'd also like to thank Bill Flanagan who has helped me tremendously in many areas of the public and private wikis.

Having prepared via our "warmup time" with the private wiki, many of the students in my lab have begun to take open notebook steps in the past few weeks. You can find links to these on our open-research projects section. Anthony Salvagno has started doing real open-notebook science, keeping his daily notes on OWW, using the Lab Notebook system that Ricardo and others developed. Anthony is about to start learning molecular biology in our collaborator's lab, with guidance from Kelly Trujillo. The lab is not accustomed to e-notebooks, so it's going to be really tough for Anthony to not be driven to use a paper notebook. We'll see how it goes, I'm hoping he can show them the way!

Caleb Morse is embarking on some MediaWiki projects and we're trying to do our communication via OWW. There are many interesting things he might pursue this semester, many of them improvements to OWW and / or MediaWiki that can make the conduction of open research much easier. For example, he's currently working on modifying an extension to MW that uses cookies to prevent data loss when the browser crashes or closes while editing a page. This would be a huge plus for OWW.

Finally, Andy Maloney joined our lab in October and has learned to use the wiki very quickly. He recently took his first leap into the public wiki by posting his incredible instructions on how to build a laser diode control system from OEM parts. I'm also pushing him to post some of his earlier research accomplishments on OWW, including a custom microscope he built for imaging ultrasonic fields via the sonoluminescence. His Google SketchUp drawings and fly-by animations of the thing are amazing and I want you all to see them!

Open teaching

I've also started posting teaching material on Scribd. I'm trying to be careful about copyrighted material, so I'm not sure whether I can keep that up. One of the things I try to do after lecturing is to "debrief" to help with next year's lecture. So, combining blogging with Scribd is a good way to do that.

Back Pat

Looking back over that list of new things we started doing only recently has made me feel great about our lab. Obviously that rate of science "opening" can't continue. But I really do think we'll be able to keep up most of the things we've started, and I'm excited about that. On our private wiki, use a template that Anthony wrote for giving yourself a pat on the back. You just add {{BP}} to a page to use the template, and then you get an electronic pat on the back and feel good about yourself. Or at least some of use do. So, I'm going to put {{BP}} on this article and it's for me and all the students in our lab for these accomplishments. It's also a {{BP}} for all of the scientists I've been talking to recently and who have helped us take all these steps. They've provided very valuable advice and examples about how to do it, as well as encouragement and feedback for the steps we've taken. Thank you!

Tenure dossier: expanded statement of goals and achievements

Image from wordle.net

I'm currently midway through my 3rd year as an assistant professor at the U. New Mexico in Albuquerque. I'm on a six year tenure clock, which is pretty typical here (though some also do 4 years). During that 6th year will be the decision whether to promote me to associate professor (with tenure), and during this 3rd year is "mid-probationary review," which I tend to think of as "practice tenure." I don't want to get into the whole process right now (though there are many amusing parts), but I'm happy to provide details and / or links I can find in the comments or a future post. Part of the tenure review process here (and I suspect at other universities) is to collect a whole slew of documents that you know nobody is going to read and assemble them into a tenure dossier.

One requirement for the dossier is the "expanded statement of scholarly professional achievements and future goals." I deduced from the outset that most people weren't going to look at my dossier, and those that did would look at this section (as opposed to the interminable appendices). So, I knew the smart thing was to spend most of my time on this statement. I didn't do the smart thing, however, so I ran out of time to revise my statement as much as I would have liked. This is a common occurrence with me, and is part of my lame time management "strategies." I don't think my statement was too bad, though, and I think if people read it they'll get a good impression of my real goals over the next couple years as a professor here. I figured I would post it here on my blog, so I'm posting it below. The only changes I'm going to make are a few minor changes and insertion of some hyperlinks here and there (we submit the dossier on paper still!!!) if I think they're helpful. I really welcome any comments, questions, and critcisms!

Here is the statement (converted from Word format):

Research

Science goals: Our lab's research area is in experimental single-molecule biophysics. To us, that means that we are primarily physicists by training, and we are applying our physics skills (building instruments, data analysis, automation, nanoscale physics) to problems in molecular cell biology. In order to maximize our impact, we seek collaborations with outstanding biologists with whom we can identify key open problems and design new experiments. Currently, our research focus is on the molecular aspects of DNA damage repair and gene transcription—two important research areas for understanding and developing treatments for all types of cancer. For example, we are using biophysical tools such as optical tweezers (an instrument that can apply and measure tiny forces on single biomolecules) to develop methods for mapping DNA by unzipping single DNA molecules extracted from living cells.

People goals: Young scientists will be the key to our lab’s success and to the long-term impact of our research. We seek to recruit diverse people with strong talents for experimental research and a passion for biophysics. Mentoring in ethical science and professional development of young scientists in the lab is a key goal and will be partially achieved by open communication and involvement of lab members in all aspects of lab operations, including funding, teaching, and outreach.

Funding goals: Our research requires people, instruments, and supplies, and thus substantial ongoing funding is essential. My goal is to obtain multi-year renewable funding that is sufficient to fund a lab of several graduate and undergraduate students and all necessary supplies. An NIH R01 grant ($200K / year direct for 5 years) is a major goal and is an ideal funding level. An NSF CAREER award ($100K / year direct for 5 years) would be a significant achievement and sufficient in combination with student fellowships. Numerous other sources of funding for our type of research are available (particularly shorter-term “idea” grants), both from public and private sources and we will pursue all of these, including after obtaining a big NSF or NIH grant. Graduate students and postdocs will also be encouraged to apply for fellowships from NSF, NIH, and other sources.

Impact Goals: First, we believe that open sharing of our plans, methods, data, results, software, etc. is the best way to speed the progress of science, the understanding of our results, and adoption of our methods. Thus, “open science” is a major goal, and one aspect of this is the traditional goal of publishing in high-impact peer-reviewed scientific journals and presenting regularly at national meetings. Second, we strive to leverage our exciting research in our teaching and service goals (below). Third, we will maximize impact through training and mentoring of students and postdocs who will make further innovations in their future careers beyond our laboratory.

Research accomplishments:

• Interdisciplinary collaboration. We have established several valuable collaborations.
• Our collaboration with the Mary Ann Osley lab (UNM Dept. Molecular Genetics and Microbiology) has resulted in generation of key biological materials (such as DNA constructs), some preliminary data, letters of support for grant applications, student fellowships, and two conference presentations.
• Collaboration with the Steve Brueck lab (UNM CHTM) has resulted in a NanoLetters publication, letters of support and preliminary data for grant applications, and student fellowships.
• Collaboration with Evan Evans (Physics, U. British Columbia; Biomedical Engineering Boston U.; Adjunct Chemical Engineering UNM) has resulted in Evans bringing two state-of-the-art single-molecule manipulation systems to the CHTM, joint recruitment of a postdoctoral researcher to UNM (funded by Evans NIH grant), and initiation of a joint research project.
• Collaboration with Karen Adelman lab (NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) has led to letters of support for grant applications and agreements to share biological materials for upcoming single-molecule research.
• We are planning collaboration with Susan Atlas lab (UNM Physics and Cancer Center) and Chris Lorenz Lab (Mechanical Engineering, King’s College London) and have submitted proposals with each lab as co-PIs as well as obtained letters of support for other grants.
• Instrumentation. Graduate and undergraduate students have played major roles in all aspects of lab start-up—providing valuable fundamental knowledge at the expense of slowing down construction. We have currently built prototype low-power optical tweezers (OT) and stretched single-DNA molecules using DNA constructs we have produced at UNM. Construction and calibration of a high-power OT system will be completed in Spring 2009. Also, partnership with Evans lab and student knowledge of OT has resulted in access to Evans’ state-of-the-art and fully calibrated OT system that he has recently (November 2008) completed transferring to a lab we share at the CHTM.
• Lab IT infrastructure. We have in place very successful hardware and software that will serve all of our needs in data storage and backup, global sharing of data and methods, and collaboration. One key to this is a 2 terabyte RAID-5 server with VPN firewall running Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003, and Internet Information Services (IIS) that was setup by a talented UNM ECE undergraduate (Caleb Morse). Another key component is a MediaWiki-based lab wiki (courtesy of OpenWetWare) that we use for all lab notebooks, lab communication, and some communication with collaborators and grant writing.
• Major results and preliminary data. Our most major research achievement has been proof-of-principle for “shotgun DNA mapping,” led by Ph.D. student Larry Herskowitz. Larry is currently writing a paper for submission to Biophysical Journal, will present a poster at the 2009 Biophysical Society meeting, and we have submitted a patent disclosure to the STC. Our collaboration with the Brueck lab has resulted in a 2008 NanoLetters publication. We have also developed two fully-functioning software applications for stochastic simulation of eukaryotic gene transcription that we hope to publish in 2009. All of these results will provide key preliminary data to strengthen grant applications in 2009 and beyond.
• Student recruitment. We currently have three physics Ph.D. candidates in the lab, all funded by fellowships--two have NSF IGERTs (two years of funding) and one has a CHTM / Emcore fellowship (8 months of funding). Two of these students have been in the lab from their second semester (spring 2007), while one student (R. Maloney) passed all of his exams and carried out significant research in the Thomas lab before transferring to our lab in late 2008. A “post-bacc” student, Diego Ramallo Pardo, performed research in our lab for over a year as part of the UNM PREP program and he is now at Stanford biophysics graduate school. An undergraduate physics major (Linh Le) is currently carrying out honors thesis research in our lab. We hosted an NNIN REU student summer of 2008. Finally, an ECE undergraduate and a biochemistry undergraduate student have carried out research for credit in our lab since early 2007.
• Funding. We obtained an American Cancer Society (ACS) starter grant for $22,500—this is an institutional research grant led by Janet Oliver in UNM Pathology. This is an important foothold in cancer research funding and is seeding preliminary results for NIH, NSF, DoD and other applications. Numerous national peer-reviewed grant applications have been submitted—none have been funded so far, but we have received much positive feedback.
• I have also participated in a number of grant writing workshops, including a year-long monthly NIH grant writing workshop (led by Laurie Hudson, UNM College of Pharmacy), a one-day NSF grant workshop (led by UNM Chem. Eng.), and an NIH NIGMS mock review panel at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting 2008.
• Open Science. We have implemented mechanisms for carrying out open science: OpenWetWare lab site with numerous protocols published; Optical tweezers control software project on Sourceforge; Lab server with Windows Server applications for sharing data over internet. I was also mentioned in an article about Open Science published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). (12/27/08 Note: I don't like the way I was quoted, though!).
  

Upcoming Research Goals:

• Funding
• Continued attempts to obtain major multi-year funding. (Maybe get lucky with a pending grant!) In 2009, planning NIH R01 to National Human Genome Research Institute, American Cancer Society (national) Research Scholar Grant, resubmission of NSF CAREER, resubmission of Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), DoD Breast Cancer Research Program Idea, and other opportunities that develop.
• Improved networking with program managers in Washington—face to face meetings when possible.
• Mentoring graduate students in obtaining NIH NRSA (fellowship) and other funding.
• Science
• In 2009, we hope to achieve major progress and publications in three areas: shotgun DNA mapping; unzipping analysis of chromatin and RNA Polymerase II transcription complexes; nanochannels analysis of DNA and chromatin. These projects will be led by the three graduate students as major focuses of their dissertations and will be in collaboration with the Osley, Brueck, Adelman, and Evans labs.
• Also in 2009, we hope to initiate research and obtain preliminary data to initiate the collaborations with Atlas and Lorenz labs.
• People
• I do not plan on soon expanding beyond the three graduate students plus the shared postdoc with Evans. I do plan on maintaining the level of undergraduate involvement in research by recruiting REU students, undergraduates from outside physics department, and future honors thesis candidates in physics.

Teaching

Teaching Goals:

My primary mission in any course is to help students achieve goals that will benefit them in their future careers. These goals will differ depending on the course, level, and target population. Some goals will be specific learning outcomes (e.g. physics concepts) whereas others will be a broader foundation of the students’ careers (e.g. attitudes towards science; general research skills). I also strive to enhance my courses by leveraging exciting results from my research group and implementing educational innovations. While setting these goals is important, so is measuring progress—thus I intend on implementing assessment (pre- and post-testing) that is backed by education research. Finally, in any course I teach, I am a role model, leader, and motivator for the students in their university careers. Thus, I seek to maximize my accessibility to the students by facilitating many modes of interaction, particularly by leveraging modern communication, including email and messaging on WebCT and wikis.

Teaching Accomplishments:

• Two courses developed (Physics 102 “Intro Physics” and Physics 307L “Junior Lab”) with above average ICES scores.
• 27 PowerPoint lectures, hundreds of quiz and exam questions, and dozens of clicker questions and homework puzzles developed for Physics 102. Implementation of Just in Time Teaching (JiTT), peer instruction, and interactive lecture demos. Use of WebCT Vista for quizzes, homework, and communication with students. (12/27/08 Note: please let me know if you would like these materials, I am happy to share!)
  
• Wiki-based TA / instructor collaboration system developed for Physics 102. Mentored TA and two graduate RAs through process of developing and presenting one lecture.
• Innovative “open science” wiki system implemented for Physics 307L—completely electronic and public lab notebooks, lab summaries, formal reports, and instructor feedback.
• Attended American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) “New Faculty Workshop” in November 2008. Learned about a variety of research-proven physics instructions methods and where to find further information and teaching resources.

Upcoming Teaching Goals:

• Implementation of research-proven assessment in all courses (pre- and post-testing).
• Refinement of teaching strategies, based on published physics education research that I learned about at AAPT workshop.
• Presentation at UNM teaching conference and possible publication of innovative teaching strategies I’ve implemented so far. (12/27/08 Note: I am starting to do this with my new teaching blog.)
  
• Teaching a third course in P&A department (probably calculus-based intro physics).

Service

Service Goals:

University: My goal for university service is to help guide and improve research and education in the department, college, and university through active participation in a few committees. Local community: My goals for service in Albuquerque and New Mexico are (a) to improve science education, (b) recruit minorities to the university sciences, and (c) improve the understanding and enjoyment of science by non-scientists. Nation: My goal is to make an impact on biophysics at the national and international level by committee service in the Biophysical Society, journal referee and grant reviewing service, “open science” leadership, and recruitment and mentoring of young scientists, including minorities.

Service Accomplishments:

• Participation in numerous committees in department, CHTM, and university-wide.
• Minor committee member for two Ph.D. students outside my lab.
• Several outreach activities with students and teachers in NM at middle and high school levels.
• OpenWetWare leadership—especially electronic lab notebooks.

Upcoming Service Goals:

• Participation in another P&A committee within the next couple years– graduate recruitment desirable.
• Service on Biophysical Society national committee ( I have volunteered and expect to be appointed in 2009).
• Continued leadership in Open Science via involvement with OpenWetWare.
• Expanded journal referee and grant review service.
• Expanded local community outreach. I want to continue my lab’s involvement in local science fairs and I would like to develop partnerships with local science teachers as part of likely NSF CAREER award resubmission in 2009. I would also like to expand UNM’s role in local Habitat for Humanity projects, based on what I learned via participation in Sandia National Labs’ successful Habitat for Humanity program—but this will likely have to wait a few years.