The idea-for-an-experiment generator

Yesterday, Scicurious wrote a very honest post about how she thought that she didn't have enough ideas to write grants and stay in academic science. This is something that I hear around me every now and then (mostly from women). I have given this some thought before: how brilliant do your ideas have to be? Because I think that is what people mean when they say they don't have enough ideas: that they don't have enough brilliant ideas. But honestly, I think that the percentage of brilliant ideas in science is maybe 1-2% of all the science that is done. I think that the bulk of science is to repeat something with a slight modification to come up with something 'new'. For example instead of looking at the dopamine system in behavior A, you now study the opioid system and you have another grant proposal. Of course nobody admits that this is how they come up with new experiments, but I have a sneaking suspicion that most PIs will have a variation of the machine below in their office somewhere. 

The optogenetics experiment generator: pick your opsin, roll the bingo wheel for brain region A, spin the wheel of fortune for brain region B and roll the dice for your behavior of choice. This generator can be modified for experiments in any field of life science and beyond.

I can haz job!

So I have been complaining about how hard it is to find a TT job in my homecountry and how often people seem to get jobs through the back door instead of through vacancies that are posted somewhere. For a while it seemed like I needed to get at least a personal grant or fellowship in order to continue doing science in the homecountry. And since my husband already got a personal grant and the homecountry's scientific organization made him move back before a certain date, it looked like not getting a grant would mean no job for me (at least not the job that I would want). One fellowship that I applied for got rejected, and one got a score that _might_ get funded, but more likely will nog get funded. And even if it got funded, the European Union decided that only half a salary would be enough to "integrate your career"… So things were looking a bit bleak and where last year I was sad that there were so little TT jobs advertised, now I was sad that maybe this meant that I would have to look for other jobs outside of science. And even though I'm not sure if that would be what I want, the prospect of never patching a cell anymore really made me really kind of sad.
But this morning brought the happy email saying that I can come work as a post-doc for a year on project that I'm very interested in, at the university where Dr. BrownEyes has a job too. So yes, I am very happy that I'm going from being a Research Associate here to being a post-doc in the homecountry and I am very happy about it. And I could insert all kinds of disgruntled postdoc comments here, but I won't. Cause I'm happy I get to do science for at least another year and a half.

Happy holidays everyone!

On delusional academics

The other day, I was talking to transitioning out of academia with a couple people in my lab. One of the grad students had just had a conversation with a senior PI (but not our PI) about that. The senior PI had said that ze didn’t understand that people would leave academia. Ze understood that times were rough now, with the economy being bad and funding being low, but if everyone would just wait it out, things would turn for the better and we could all stay in academia. Yeah right. Sadly, the grad student didn’t ask what we were all supposed to do while waiting for the economy to get better, so I don’t know the answer to that. And I wonder if said senior PI would know the answer.

The suckiest part of being a scientist and a mom...

... to me right now is the unpredictability of sleep. In order to function at a decent level I need a certain amount of sleep. And being pregnant I need a little more too I think. Pre-baby I knew that if I had important stuff to write (like the pile of grants and fellowships that I'm writing now), I would go to bed early and make sure I'm rested so that I can be focused the next day. Now, I can go to bed however early I want, but if BlueEyes is having a crappy night, then so am I.

I haven't written a lot about baby sleep recently, but it's still not awesome. A great night is when BlueEyes wakes up for the first time around 2 pm and an awesome night is when he doesn't wake up at all, but these awesome nights can be counted on the fingers of half a hand. Most of the time I'm okay with that. I know that after a crappy night, a better night will follow. But in these pre-deadline days when I'm slightly stressed about funding and what that means for my career (slightly is really a huge understatement) I find myself having a hard time to keep my cool about this. And it has been proven now that me panicking about lack of sleep in the middle of the night does not increase sleep for anyone in this family. So there's that. Back to grant writing (1 down, 3 to go).

This is your brain on pregnancy

Last pregnancy, I did mostly experimental work and very little writing. That was nice, as my auto-pilot worked very well, but my thinking and focus abilities seemed a bit disturbed by being pregnant. This time around, I still need to finish 4 grants before this baby is due by the end of November. Truth be told, one is a resubmission and the other three have been in the making for a couple months, so I still think this is very doable. However, I do feel that some days my ability to stay focused and remember where I read something, or which paper to refer to seems a bit off. Is this really a pregnancy thing? Is something happening to my brain?! The all-knowing Dr. Oz says the following about it: 

 “Dr. Oz says a woman's brain also shrinks by about 8 percent. "You don't lose cells. The cells get smaller," he says. "It might be because you're focused on one thing, but the good news is after you give birth, your brain begins to rewire quickly. … Your brain actually gets more powerful than before you got pregnant."

Apparently he knows more than the rest of us, because the only data I could find were structural MRI studies showing that indeed the brain shrinks a bit, and the ventricles containing cerebrospinal fluid get a bit bigger when you are pregnant. The 8% (that you read on a lot of popular pregnancy websites by the way) seems to be a bit much too, as this study for example just finds a change of approximately 4% in brain size (in healthy pregnant women that is, women with preeclampsia have more brain shrinkage). And with MRI there is really no way that one can say that this is your cells shrinking and especially not that after birth your brain rewires quickly: you can simply not see that on an MRI.

Yes, this is your brain on pregnancy, from this study. A is the pre-pregnant brain, and B is the pregnant brain, at full term. Note that the ventricles are enlarged in B. (Are you also that annoyed by popular science magazines saying “this is your brain on… [insert whatever] and then show a picture of an MRI? Me too!)

So yes, your brain gets a bit smaller when you are pregnant. But does a 4% decrease in size affect your ability to write grants? Only time will tell.

Should I stay or should I go? –part 2

Part 1 can be found here and is about staying in Europe or going for a post-doc abroad. This one is about staying in academia or not. I’m clearly not the only one pondering this.

I know I’ve written about this before, but the question whether I am going to stay in academia or not came on the foreground a bit more after having received a faculty position rejection (from the homecountry) and a fellowship rejection. I guess it is safe to guestimate that given my CV and ideas I usually rank in the top 15-20% when applying for grants and fellowships (yup, the n is large enough to guestimate this from). Given the current funding situation, this might not be enough. And FYI, the homecountry (to which we are sure we will return now that husband has a position there) does not have the equivalent of SLACs, so the option to do research there does not exist. 

I gave myself another year(ish) to get a position and/or grants and if that doesn’t work, I’m going to look for something else. But is that a good strategy or should I start looking now and determine what skills I need and get those skills now? And won’t that take away from the energy that I need to spend on getting myself from the top 15-20% to the top 10 or whatever % that is necessary to succeed? How do other people do this? Can you do both at the same time? Please enlighten me, people who have successfully transitioned out of academia AND people who have looked outside academia but decided to stay (and anyone else with something useful to say)!

What is an acceptable page-for-money ratio?

Currently, I am working on a grant for European money to work in the homecountry. This grant asks for a ridiculous number of pages where you have to tell them all about the proposal (in a variety of different ways) (7 pages), your own competence (5 pages), something called implementation (4 pages) and impact (5 pages). All this work is required for 4 years of about half a senior post-doc salary. Half! So not even an entire salary, or extra money for consumables, travel or another person. Still, I’m doing it because any extra money is good and there is only a limited option in terms of which grants to apply for. However, I do think it’s a pretty ridiculous amount of money when you look at what you get, especially compared to another foundation grant I applied for that is a similar amount of money but only asked for a 2-page proposal and your biosketch.

So my question for this afternoon: what ratio of pages/money is acceptable and when would you decide not even to bother? (I understand that the percentage that is funded is also a factor in deciding whether to apply but that’s for another time).

Will science for money

Last week we were in the homecountry to visit family, eat yummy food and talk to the professor I’m writing a bunch of grants with to return there. Due to the sad funding situation, he (or the department) won’t be able to hire me, unless one of the grants gets funded. We are planning to move back in a year (also because the lab that I’m in will be closing by then), so there’s still some time to get grants funded. But I’m starting to get a little panicky about it every now and then. Sure I’m applying to other places, but we also have this two-body-problem and this city and university would just be the top one choice for various reasons.

So the professor I talked to also set me up to talk to another professor who just got this big European grant. This professor had heard of me and was impressed by my skill set (literal quote:”you would be a great person to have in our department because of that”. Yay! So what could he offer me? A post-doc position for five years for which I would have to officially interview. On the one hand I don’t really want to be a post-doc for 10 years (!) but I also don’t want to work at the local grocery store when none of the grants I’m writing is funded (or when I’m applying for other jobs). So we came to the conclusion that until anything else materializes this would be a good back-up plan.

So I’m sort of happy about the prospect of at least being someone’s post-doc for a while, who would have thought that would happen? Or is this the moment when you decide to leave academia…?

Source. Hire me! I actually have more papers than him.