With startup funds rapidly dwindling and major external grant funding elusive, this year has been arguably the hardest of my professional career. I don’t say it lightly given that other notable gut punches included switching Read more
I’ve been thinking about doing a year in review for the lab but it has been difficult to think about. It’s been quite a rough year. Last year, I was very optimistic. We had gotten positive comments Read more
Maybe you’ve been optimizing an experiment for a while and finally have it working. You do that first solid trial and see a cool effect! Hurray!! Now what? The urge to run and tell your Read more
Last year, we held a Career Development Week for the lab, in which I encouraged everyone to take a little extra time to focus on their career goals. For this exercise, I provide a list Read more
One thing that shocked me when I started my faculty position was the explosion of opportunities. As a grad student and postdoc, I remember clawing for opportunities that seemed all too infrequent. Upon starting my Read more
Scientific writing doesn’t come naturally to most of us and is a craft that is honed over a lifetime of practice. One thing that can make the process of writing and getting feedback from your Read more
I saw this great tweet today from @Holz_lab: When PI proposes an experiment, don’t jump on it right away. High chance they’ll change something upon pondering #protip — Marina Holz (@Holz_lab) It’s so important for Read more
For a little change of pace, this past week I replaced our regular lab meeting with a writing exercise. Nearly every person in the lab was thinking about or actively working on a manuscript, so Read more
It’s almost summer and a new class of graduate students will be starting soon (we usually get at least a few students that do summer rotations). This got me thinking about how students select rotation Read more
Every once in a while on New PI Slack we revisit the discussion about lab expectations and onboarding documents. Our lab has a private onboarding document (private because it contains a lot of specific information about our data Read more
