The value of an open-access publication record for an academic job search and tenure & promotion.

11:22 am update

Steve says: I just read Gideon Burton's excellent post about "Intellectual Apartheid." One of his recommended steps for administrators is "Update promotion and tenure policies to favor open access publications and to accommodate evolving scholarly genres (such as data sets, software, and scholarly tools that build the cyberinfrastructure)."

Earlier this week, my department chair sent our department a link to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about MIT's open-access policy announcement. (I believe there is the standard irony that the article from the Chronicle is limited-access, but you may be able to find freely available stories on Google news.)

Without being an expert on open-access or doing much background research, I decided to send the following email to my department. I'll let you know what happens (if anything)!

Email to Physics & Astronomy faculty:

This got me to thinking. Our department could adopt a simple & public policy, such as: "Regarding new faculty hires and promotion & tenure decisions, we highly value an open access publication record. We place a value on open access publishing comparable to the value we place on publishing in top-tier scholarly journals which may have limited access." I don't know whether we could agree on such a statement, but if we could, I think it would place a positive light on our department, similar to how the MIT and Harvard statements below do for those universities.

As a tenure-track faculty in our department, I do feel that open-access publishing will be viewed positively by the voting faculty. It would be good to know that more formally, but I'm not worried. A much more worrisome thing for me is how open-access publishing will affect my Ph.D. students.
Will they lose out in job searches or will they stand out? Our own department's stand on this issue won't help our own students. But maybe by taking a public stand, we can set an example that other departments can follow.

I think it'd be worth spending a bit of time discussing at an upcoming faculty meeting.

--Steve

Assistant to Robot, Promoted to Robot

I was telling my grad students this story last week, and they liked mocking me so much as "assistant to a robot" that I thought I should post the story on here so more people can mock me. My first job in a research lab was the summer before starting my undergraduate career at the University of Michigan as a physics major--1992. I was really lucky get a summer job in one of Francis Collins' labs at UM. Yes, I am name dropping. The name I just dropped was that of Francis Collins, who was leader of the NHGRI from 1994-ish to 2008. Prior to that he was at the University of Michigan, with primary roles of hiring me as a work-study student and also leading teams that found the genes for cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, neurofibromatosis, and other diseases.

I have been lucky so often in my life, and in particular in my career "planning." I'll tell you some other day how lucky I got in obtaining my current job at UNM. This is how I obtained my first job in a research lab: I was friends with Dr. Collins' daughter, and I liked science. I knew he had a research lab because he had visited our classroom in Junior High to tell us about cystic fibrosis and genetics. So, I asked my friend if I could work in her Dad's lab. A few days later, she told me, "he says yes," or something along those lines. I was 17 years old at the time. But when writing this story, it seems like I was younger, as I recognize this strategy as the same one I used for obtaining a rollerskating "skate" with a girl in the 6th grade. I think the song was "Manic Monday."

I actually worked in a lab led by Chandra Sekharappa, who I think now has this lab. He was such a great guy and I am eternally grateful to him, Dr. Collins, and the other people in that lab who welcomed the unusual physics undergraduate to their lab. As I am writing this blog entry, a flood of memories are coming back to me. I learned so many things from working in this lab, and now, 17 years later, they are still coming back to me and helping me in my research (which coincidentally, or probably not coincidentally is tending towards genomics applications). In this lab is where I learned to pipette. I learned what PCR was. I unfolded paper towels for Northern blots. I "stuffed tips" (FYI: I could use each hand independently on two different boxes). I helped with "rows and columns." I washed dishes. Wow, did I wash dishes. I became obsessed with: -80 freezers; dry ice; vacuum-bake ovens; centrifuges; liquinox; reverse-osmosis water; latex gloves; latex gloves filled with water and frozen in the -80C freezer; and latex gloves in the vacuum-bake oven.

I cannot even come close to expressing how important this experience was to my career. Being immersed in this environment was so valuable -- whether I knew it at the time or not. The lab was focused on cloning the gene for early-onset familial breast cancer. (I believe another lab ultimately beat them by identifying BRCA1, but I'm not sure.) There was such a palpable excitement about the race to find this gene and I loved watching it. I distinctly remember that Dr. Collins welcomed me into group meetings, where the postdocs or grad students (I'm not sure what they were) would pass around these developed images of gels with the faintest of bands that proved something about their PCR reaction. I distinctly remember that they'd let the ignorant physics undergraduate stare at the film and then tolerate it when I said, "I think you're crazy, there's no band there." Somehow they kept inviting me, and they kept trying to explain to me "gene jumping" or "chimerisms" or "FISH" or other topics. The collaborative atmosphere in Chandra and Francis's lab is something I'm striving to replicate in our lab at UNM.

OK, now onto the good part. Of course, being the undergraduate in the lab made me a target for the grunt work. More than that, I wasn't even a biologist! So, it happened that the lab (or someone on the floor) had gotten their hands on a robotic system that could essentially print microarrays on filter paper. Or perhaps the predecessor to microrrays. The "robot" could print media from sixteen 96-welled plates onto a single filter paper. Then, these 4x4 arrays could be used for some kind of hybridization assays. This was a big deal, and the robot cost something in the 100's of thousands of dollars. Basically, you'd put a stack of 16 microtiter plates in the holder next to the robot. You'd set up the filter paper, and then the robot would proceed to: grab a plate; take lid off plate; put plate down; stick pins in plate; stick pins on filter paper; clean pins; put lid on plate; put plate away; repeat with new plate.

The problem was, the robot was controlled by some kind of SGI machine that nobody knew how to program. It cost a whole bunch of money to have the tech rep come out and program the thing. Everything about the robotic system worked well. Except, after taking the lid off the plate, it accelerated too fast, and media would splash from one well to another. This was terrible. I know what you're thinking: ask the physics undergrad to reprogram the robot! This is what I was thinking too when the grad students (or postdocs) explained to me the problem. I'm pretty sure I could have figured this out, no matter how obscure and proprietary the programming language. But, this was not my fortune. Instead, what they had figured out was that my $5.50 / hour salary was a perfect solution. I could perform the first part of the robotic sequence (grab plate; take off lid) and then at the appropriate time, hand the plate to the robot. So, this is when I took on my esteemed position as "assistant to the robot." I don't know how many days this lasted ... probably not too many, I think maybe for a few hundred plates or so. I do remember how utterly boring it was. I actually tried to read a book in 20 second increments while I tag-teamed with the robot.

Perhaps during my time as Assistant to the Robot, I impressed people enough to get my first promotion in the lab: to actual robot. (I previously mentioned my prowess at stuffing tips and unfolding paper towels, which probably factored into this promotion.) This job took most of a summer (1993 maybe?) and actually I'm pretty proud of it. My task was to copy the Washington University YAC (yeast artificial chromosome) library. I think it was about 200 96-welled plates and it took me most of a summer to make two copies. I became the most efficient plate-pourer of all time (in my own mind), and discovered that you can actually pour them so thin that even yeast can't grow. I wonder if these YAC libraries are still around nowadays?

Well, that's the anti-climactic ending to my story. I don't have a coherent point, and I know this goes against all of the how-to-be-a-good-blogger advice. My points are: (1) I collaborated with a robot in the past because it was cheaper than fixing the robot and (2) I had an awesome undergraduate research experience that has profoundly impacted my career. In regards to (2), there are so many lessons I can learn to help me in my current position as a research mentor. The main thing I have been thinking is that undergraduate research can be valuable for the lab, and incredibly valuable for the undergraduate. I feel like we're not even coming close to achieving what we could at UNM in regards to undergraduate research, and I would like to change this over the next couple years. I routinely meet Junior-level physics majors who are interested in research, but haven't yet been in a lab. We are next door to Sandia National Labs, and only 2 hours away from Los Alamos National Lab...both of which have amazing resources and opportunities for undergraduate scientists. And of course, we have plenty of our own labs at UNM. One of my goals over the next few years is to help our students find research jobs earlier in their careers...perhaps even before they start at UNM. Whether their jobs can be as prestigious as my own assistant to robot jobs, I don't know, but I can definitely strive for that!

SJK Note 4/2/09: I found a picture in my garage of the completed robot project. That's me admiring my 400? or so microtiter plates, all nicely stacked and labeled.

A science outreach idea, what do you think?

I live on a cul-de-sac where we are lucky enough to know and enjoy hanging out with many of our neighbors. Many have kids who play with our kids. It's like when I was a kid, and I thought those days had passed, but they haven't. (As an aside, I love hyphen-ating words, but it bothers me that cul-de-sac is hyphen-ated.)

Many of my neighbors really enjoy hearing about the science we're doing in the lab, and I really enjoy talking about it with them. This actually led to a very fun event we did during Winter Break where I brought in some neighbors to our Junior Physics lab course so they could get hands-on experience with some very cool physics. You can check out our OpenWetWare page (unfinished) for the event (sorry the facebook page seems to be private). A brief summary is that I only had to invest a few hours of time, and I think the attendees really enjoyed it. I know I did.

Recently I had an idea for science outreach that I'd like your opinion on. The idea is that I (or a student) will explain our research to one of our biggest neighbor fans. Then, we'll record an interview with him describing our science, what we do, it's importance, etc., from his point of view. Or we could do it with a couple neighbors talking. But the main point is that the non-scientists will be explaining the science to the (mostly) non-scientist audience on youtube.

There are a few reasons I think this may be useful and fun. First, I always find it informative and fun to hear people "re-describe" our research to someone else after I've described it (unless it's printed in a magazine). Second, I have an inkling that it would be effective for communicating to non-scientists. Third, the people I have in mind for this project are very good at picking out the essence of what I'm telling them, and distilling it down to the exciting parts in layman's terms.

So, do you think this is a good idea? Maybe it's been tried before many times, and if so, please send me the links. If we do give this a whirl, there is one thing I'd like to figure out how to do:

• Record video with two cameras (for example, one on me, one on him)
• Splice and edit the video to make a good video for posting to youtube

I'd really appreciate advice on software and hardware to use for those purposes. Thanks!

Personal open science challenges

There was recently a very interesting thread regarding open notebook science in the Science 2.0 friendfeed room. This was in response to Michael Nielson announcing that Tobias Osborne had begun doing open notebook quantum information theory. I think this is fantastic, and my kudos go to Tobias (whom I don't know). The friendfeed debate had to do with whether Tobias's work can be called open notebook science, which has a specific definition.

The debate got me thinking again about something that's been bothering me recently. I've been having a hard time getting my thoughts straight, and that's still true. I'll quote myself and then try to clarify:

A really good motto for a scientist who wants to be open could be this: "Be as open as I personally want to be." This is very different than "be as open as possible." What I am specifically thinking is that young scientists (i.e., not yet beaten-down) seem to usually have very natural tendencies towards open science. But the overall level of natural talent for openness may vary enough that "open notebook science" may just not be the best method of openness for some people. But everyone can strive to "be as open as they want to be", and resist pressure to be closed coming from outside (fear of scooping; lack of technical means; resistance from colleagues). In contrast to these external pressures, I think it may be legitimate for someone to want to be open, but also maintain some privacy so they can get a personal reward of doing something all by themselves, for example. Perhaps posting all of their electronic notes 6 months or a year down the line.

"Be as open as I want to be." I don't know if that has value for anyone else, but it a very powerful mission statement for me right now. It's powerful, because I really believe in it, but I am not achieving it. I'll talk about that later in the post. But, first I want to talk about it in a more positive light.

What kind of openness should be required?

I am starting to decide that I'm not going to try to force my lab members to do specific kinds of open science. I am thinking instead that my goal will be to remove as many barriers as possible so that my lab members can achieve the level of openness they desire. I believe that adults have unchangeable natural talents, and I think that scientists will be cutout for different kinds of openness. For example, Anthony in our lab has recently started doing open notebook science, true to its definition. I am really excited about this. He is a natural for ONS. I don't think that he has any problem writing anything in public. In fact, I think his notebook being open is a motivator for him to make it even better than he would a private notebook. This is the way he's wired, and it's not surprising if you know him. In contrast, I think some people would find that their creativity and drive are seriously hampered by doing ONS. For example, me as a graduate student. I don't know whether doing ONS would have worked or not. I actually kept what I think is a very good electronic lab notebook. But it was private, and I don't know whether I would have taken as many notes (and dropped as many F-bombs) if I knew it was public. I also don't know if I would have reacted well to someone posting a suggestion to me when I was immersed in trying to figure out something by myself. I do know that I would have been fine posting my notebook in public with some time delay. In fact, if anyone posts a comment to this blog asking me to post my grad school notebook in public, I'll go ahead and do that...f-bombs and all.

So, while I don't think I'll require ONS for all lab members, I may have other requirements, such as delayed notebook publishing. What I am worried about is hampering creativity and productivity of young scientists by striving for inappropriately selected open science goals. I do want my students (and postdocs in the future) to strive for open science, but I want them to do it in the way that best leverages their talents.

I am failing at my own principles

"Be as open as I want to be." I and our lab have made some great strides in the past few months towards this principle. For me, I think the transformation was fueled by a strong belief in the power and even morality of open science. But it did take a heavy dose of "what the fuck" to spark the flurry of steps I took this past winter break. (I think that may be my first f-bomb while blogging; I feel alive.) I'm happy and excited about what we're doing. But I'm also not achieving openness as much as I'd like. And I'm confused. Two themes dominate my struggles with openness:

• The students in my labs and their scientific careers
• My collaborators, their careers, and my gratitude for their assistance and mentoring
  

I'm not trying to sound altruistic here. One of my talents is that I get genuine happiness out of feeling like I've helped other people succeed. You can see that both of those items above feed that desire in me. I do think those two items are what is confusing me. In contrast, the issue of being scooped, in itself does not impact my thinking. I do worry about being scooped, but I have already concluded that being open does not increase the chances of being scooped. I believe being open decreases the chances of being accidentally scooped substantially. Furthermore, I even believe that being completely open would reduce the chances of being purposefully scooped. This is because the published track record would make it easier to shame the person who did the scooping.

Being scooped would be emotionally devastating. This is true. And it would have an impact on my lab and my students. This is what my students and I have been discussing the past couple years, and I think we've developed a collective (perhaps unspoken) understanding that we'll be OK even if that does happen. I think I can protect and rescue my students from that scenario. The collaborator issue is so much more complicated.

The collaborator issue is what is bothering me quite a bit now, and I really don't have any answer. Most of the scientists I know personally are "traditional." The ones I am trying to collaborate with are outstanding and highly respected by everyone, including me. The ones I am thinking about right now have put in a huge amount of effort helping me throughout various stages of my career. These traditional scientists, of course, are not Scientists 2.0, but they are fantastic scientists. I suspect, and in some cases directly know, that they would not approve of my science openness. So, I don't know how to deal with this external pressure towards closed science. The "what the fuck" strategy seems so disrespectful to people who've put energy into my career. But the "try to convince" them strategy is futile. "Showing them the way" will work...but at the risk of looking like "what the fuck" along the way and angering them. If we do get scooped, my students and I will be OK. But our mentors may never forgive us?

OK, I'm going to stop now...those are the challenges that are really bothering me this weekend.

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!

Talents in the Lab

So, I just got back from a vacation--no internet access for a week! Ugh--I think some people find getting away from it all rejuvenating, but that is not me at all. In fact, this would be a complete non-talent for me. "Non-talent" is terminology from a book that I re-read while on vacation: "First Break All the Rules..." by Buckingham and Coffman. I first read this book several years ago, when I was immersed in the misery of being mismanaged. The concepts in this book are not complicated and to me even seem obvious (now that I've thought about them), but it still seems to be true that most managers ignore these concepts. Re-reading the book last week was even more illuminating, now that I've had a couple years of being a manager myself and can reflect on my own strengths and weaknesses as a lab manager and plan small changes that may have a big effect on outcomes for our students and the science we're doing.

One of my talents is the ability to read these kinds of management and leadership books without getting too hung up on the fact that they're not perfect science. Though, I do like this one especially because it is founded in a whole bunch of research (the authors are out of Gallup Consulting) and objective analysis. Via hundreds of thousands of interviews with employees and managers across all types of industries they tried to determine common qualities of managers whose groups far outperform the others. Thus, they tried to find out what great managers do differently than good and bad managers. The main points they found out ring very true for me, and really, THE main point is that great managers recognize the following things:

• By the time people are grownups, their brains have been "wired" in unique ways because of their genetics and their experiences growing up. These genetics and experiences produce a set of talents and "non-talents" for any individual. The authors refer to this as the unique "filter" each individual uses for their everyday experiences. The key point is that these talents are not teachable to grownups and great managers recognize this. Skills and knowledge contrast with talents, in that they are teachable. Learning skills and knowledge is easy for someone with underlying talent in that area. Learning skills and knowledge without the underlying talent is a constant uphill battle.

• In order to succeed and be happy in a particular job, a person needs certain talents. Great managers figure out what those talents are, and try to assess those talents when hiring people. Contrast this with the system most of us are familiar with, where people are assessed based on resumes and interviews which focus on skills and knowledge. Determining what talents a job requires is not easy. It's even more difficult for a manager to assess someone's talents. And possibly, for many people, the most difficult thing is for an individual to assess their own personal talents--I know it is very difficult for me.

• A great manager spends time helping his people discover their own talents and helps them make career decisions based on those talents.

I think while reading this book in graduate school was the first time I'd consciously considered talents existing for things besides athletics, music, acting. I think I easily accepted, for example, that professional musicians had innate "hard-wired" abilities that enabled them to enjoy the hard work it took them to achieve that kind of excellence. I knew I didn't have those talents and didn't entertain any notion that I could just "work really hard" to become a professional musician or athlete. But I don't think I ever considered the vast array of other ways people could be talented, or non-talented, and I think I was probably a subscriber to the popular notion that I could succeed at any kind of job I landed just by forcing myself to work hard. And if I was failing it was my own fault for not working hard or smartly.

While considering that last paragraph, I think it's not quite correct. Back then, I probably did recognize the existence of many talents, but I had not sensibly defined them. For example, I may have thought I had a "talent for science," since from 1st grade through graduate school I had received good grades and succeeded in science "things." Therefore, I would have deduced that I have a talent for any kind of career related to science: graduate student, professor, R&D, science writer, elementary school science teacher, science policy advisor, etc. In fact, I think I entertained the notion of all of those careers at some point. I probably made the reasonable step of considering whether I'd like those careers, but I did not even come close to considering that it was my own talents and non-talents that would determine whether those careers would be thrilling or miserable.

Ever since reading that book, I've been wondering about my own talents. Ironically, I'm untalented at discovering my own talents. I suppose some people are very talented in this. When I preach to my students about this topic, I'm often asked, "What are your talents?" I know that I have many talents, and some I know specifically. For example, I know that I absolutely love computer programming. I can work on data analysis applications for 16 hours straight days at a time and love it. This is a talent for me, and considering that I was spending 10 hours a day in 3rd grade playing around with BASIC on my Commodore 64 this is not a surprising talent. But it's one I don't get to use very much any more, due to my career choice. I also know that I have a lot of non-talents. I think it's just as important to discover these, and for me these are easier to find. I'm still not quite sure what it's called, but I have at least one non-talent that would be required for easy writing of scientific papers and grant applications. In contrast, I find these blogs fun and fairly easy to spew out--I enjoy this kind of writing, and I probably have some kind of talent that is being used by blogging. But there is something about the precision or brevity or efficiency or whatever about formal papers and in particular grant writing that give me serious writer's block. I have been writing grants for two years now and it is always unpleasant and very difficult. I feel like I produce good documents, but it is very far from easy.

That last point is the key: it's not easy. (And I don't enjoy most parts of it.) This is a great way of discovering talents. In the book, they cite a manager (anonymously, unfortunately) who developed the "Sunday Night Blues Test." He asked his employees to stop and think on a Sunday night whether they were happy the weekend was over, or whether they were a little depressed. (Assuming a five day work week.) The employees then were to consider what specific things they had planned to do the next day. Their level of happiness / unhappiness about their activities the next day would be a way of understanding what talents or non-talents they possessed. I like this test, and it's helped me quite a bit in assessing myself.

I've used a variation of the test in the courses I've taught, in the hopes that my students will learn something about themselves far earlier than I ever did. On the last day of class in the four semesters I've taught, I've presented them this last un-graded homework assignment. You can view it on this openwetware page. I ask them to reflect back on the semester that's ended and to ask themselves which courses they're most sad are ending and which they are elated to be done with. I ask them to think about specific assignments that were fun or others that were dreaded. I don't have any kind of evidence, but I feel like there's enough variety of things students are asked to do that they may be able to discover talents and non-talents this way. A few of my students "turn in" this assignment via email or WebCT, and I always find it fascinating and pleasurable to read what they have to say. Usually these are students that I've come to know a bit, so I can give them a little feedback on it too, which I enjoy. (This probably indicates a talent I have for getting true pleasure out of students' successes.)

I realize this blog is getting long. I think I did say above that brevity is a non-talent of mine. I'm considering breaking this into two posts, but instead, I think I'm going to leave it as one post glued together by this added paragraph.

So, as I mentioned above, I re-read this book a couple weeks ago, and I must have marked up every other page and wrote down several dozen ideas it gave me for how to better teach, manage our lab, and be a better person. One of those ideas which I've followed through on is to work on identifying talents of the students in our lab. I have a few reasons for wanting to do this. The most important reason is that I want to maximize the success of every student that comes through our lab. I really believe that the more they can understand about themselves and their talents, the happier and more successful they will be in their next career step. The next reason is that I can manage the lab much more effectively if I know what talents and non-talents my students have. I'm not sure I have the talent to do this, but I am sure that it can't hurt for me to know more.

Believe it or not, I actually had a "talents" meeting with all three of my graduate students this week...between 2 and 3 hours with each person. I even went so far as to use the interviewing questions from the book. This was really cheesy, but my students trust me enough to have followed through honestly with the process. The questions are designed to reveal talents. I left the book in my office, so I can't quote any of them directly now, but some of the questions I found most revealing were:

• What keeps you working here? (in the lab)

• What is the best kind of praise you have ever received? What made it so good?

• What is a productive partnership or mentorship you've had? Why did it work so well?

• What are your current goals and what is your timeline for achieving them?

• How often do you want to meet with me to discuss your progress?

All the questions are good, but those are coming to mind now as having elicited responses that pointed towards talents or non-talents.

I don't want to get into any specific results here, because my students and I didn't really discuss yet whether this process would be open or not. Actually, what I'm hoping is that through this continuing dialog, it will become a habit of our lab to point out to each other obvious talents and even non-talents. I think we have a lot of respect and trust in each other, so it's likely we can achieve this kind of productive openness. In any case, without being too specific, I can tell you that I was really surprised at how much I learned from these meetings. Even considering that I already expected them to be productive meetings. Again, I think I am lucky to have very good and trusting students, so our dialog was very open. In addition to the questions from the book, I also asked each student to talk about their most productive time(s) in the lab so far. (Another variation on the Sunday Night Blues Test.) I found this incredibly useful.

One of the most humorous, surprising, and potentially useful result was what I learned about the students' and my own talent for competitiveness. If someone has this talent, they are driven to compete and win against other people. A different kind of talent is a need for achievement. This is different, because it is not relative to other people, but an internal measuring stick and a desire to constantly improve. It turns out I and one of my students have a strong competitiveness quality. This didn't surprise me too much. What did surprise me was that the other students did not have this quality. One common flaw of managers is to follow the golden rule of treating others the way you'd like to be treated. I have this flaw too. Up until this week, I think I'd pretty much assumed that everyone was competitive. But what I discovered is that's completely not true. I had also down-played my own competitiveness, and I now realize it's an important part of me and my motivations. So, what can I do with this information? I'm not sure, but given how surprising some of it was, I don't see how it can make me a worse manager. Just a simple example is that if you try to motivate an achiever and a competitor by having them compete against each other it's not going to work well. I don't think I've tried do that, but as a manager I'm always doing something , whether or not I'm trying to.

I'm going to try to wrap up this wandering post now. If you have a talent for reading management or self-help books, I strongly recommend you read the book I've linked above, "First Break All the Rules." If you don't have that talent, I do recommend trying out different ways of discovering your own talents. During the few weeks I've been on FriendFeed, I've already seen a few people making or considering career moves. I think talents are the number one thing that will determine whether these moves produce success and happiness. A perfect example is the ineffective way in which university faculty are chosen. Successful graduate students and postdocs are evaluated for professorships based upon their achievements, skills, and knowledge as researchers in the lab. The job, however, is not at all similar. I am now a manager, teacher, grant-writer, leader, and I don't know what else...but I'm not doing research in the lab very often if at all. In light of the selection process (and the utter lack of training), it's not surprising that there is so much struggle seen in this career path. Luckily, I think I do have enough of the talents required for my job, and I can ultimately succeed.

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.