Until it all, starts over... again

I've been pretty mum here about the fact that I've recently moved and changed jobs.

I think it's because I now realize how much I want to share the "how I got to what I am now" before I spend too much time talking about the straight-up details of my new job.

University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) was my first postdoctoral position following graduate school, and it has been pretty great. I generally like my coworkers and my work, Austin is beautiful and vibrant, and I got to live with my bestest favorite person (from whom I was separated for the immediately preceding two years while we finished graduate school shit). While here I've met some incredible people, officiated some incredible roller derby with the incredible Texas Rollergirls (fourth in the world, what, what!), and tasted some incredible food. Unfortunately, I've also done some incredibly trying work setting up a new lab, paid an incredible amount in parking costs, and placed an incredible number of miles onto my leased car.

More recently, funding became an increasingly pressing issue: my PI's grant is ending, and despite good scores on an NIH R01 grant, it will be unclear for months yet if there would have been money to support my continued work in the lab. I applied to become a research educator for the awesome Freshman Research Initiative at UT, but funding is tight, and the program did not have funds to support new "research streams."

This, and the rapidly approaching end of the lease on our condominium forced the hard question: Can I commit to another year in San Marcos, locking in  a long commute for both myself and the love of my life, without a guarantee that I would be employed during that time?

So, a few months ago, I started hunting for jobs in San Antonio. After all, my fiancee's permanent position was in San Antonio and I was already skating there once or twice a week with the Alamo City Rollergirls. In June I blogged that looking for academic positions was comically complex. . I know that I love doing science in the lab everyday, but the counterintuitive expectation that successful scientists leave the bench to become administration, teachers, and managers just felt stupid. I wanted off that tract, and I wanted off badly. Desperately unsure about what I wanted, I reached out to a lab that had posted a technician position, for which I was ridiculously over qualified.

But then I met this scientist and he was all human, and it was like, what do I want again? Because working with these people could be pretty awesome. Sure, it's another huge academic leap from one discipline to the next, but the cost-benefit was so disparate compared to my situation with UT-Austin: guaranteed funding, carpooling to work with the fiancee, and only a short drive from roller derby practice. We could live in a city near things and people, have social lives, and visit nice restaurants without spending more time in the car than at the table.


So, I started a new job on August 1 at the University at Texas Health Sciences Center San Antonio while still working (albeit long distance) with the group at UT-Austin. I was pretty entrenched at UT-Austin position, my exit was swift, and I had a lot of people with which I had to coordinate all of these changes (remember all of my undergraduate assistants?). The undergraduates with which I was working are now finishing some of the behavior that I help start before I left. It's so strange stepping away from a project before its natural conclusion, hoping that those I left behind pick up the slack. I know that they can, but I've never had to test that trust so completely in the past.

And like that, I know relatively nothing again. I'm a behavioral neuroscientist in an electrophysiology lab that uses patch clamp to examine dopamine signalling in a myriad of systems.  It's a bit like starting graduate school or starting the last postdoctoral position - it's an opportunity to demonstrate that I'm adaptable. At least, until it all starts over again, again.

Packed and all eyes turned in

You're going to freak out about this.

But for even for scientists, sometimes life needs to take the front seat.

We just moved into our San Antonio townhouse (before the complex was completed with their renovations or turned on the air conditioning). It's been a flurry of angry cats, drywall dust, and achingly painful flea bites in our 85 F degree abode.

OMGWTFBBQ

Say something, say something, anything. Your silence is deafening.

If you need help, ask for it.

Seriously. It's incredible how many colleagues I've seen struggle and dredge through an experimental goal that requires the implementation of new or different techniques. Sure, they've probably read some scientific articles on the topic, but seldom do I witness fellow researchers reaching out to their colleagues for help when they're struggling.

In my postdoctoral fellowship, my research focus went from preclinical traumatic brain injury with rats (in a Psychology program) to functional adult hippocampal neurogenesis (in a Neurobiology department). It was a huge leap into much harder bench work with which I wasn't familiar - which meant that I had to reach out to the undergraduate technician in the lab to learn these techniques. The other postdoc didn't need this type of tutoring, so I quickly felt like an idiot, and I think that still kind of sticks with me even today.

Not many scientists will tell you this - but working in science is essentially a commitment to frequently feeling like a moron. For example:

I have done something so profoundly dumb in an experiment that I am briefly yet frequently certain I have multiple personalities that hate one another.

One time I returned an animal cage following behavioral testing, but did not notice that an animal was missing from its cage. Turned out that the animal was in my private testing room for the entire weekend, and I didn't realize it until I found shredded paper towels in the middle of the floor, Monday morning. CT-15 was fine, but freaked out, and honestly, so was I. What kind of bonehead does that, I thought.

I have struggled with lab techniques and let it go on longer than I should have because PRIDE.

I didn't learn PCR and gel electrophoresis until my postdoc, and I was able to hide my troubles with genotyping until the laboratory technician left his position a year later. And then it still took four months for me to go from "recipe-following automaton" to "sufficiently proficient scientist." The undergraduate assistants understood more about the process than this postdoc did, so I avoided that shit like a shameful plague.

More often than not, experimental results are the opposite of what I would have predicted, despite all the science things I thought I knew on the topic.

The first study I did in graduate school demonstrated that a vitamin effective in young animals as a treatment following TBI (traumatic brain injury) was completely ineffective in middle aged animals. The finding was so surprising that my master's thesis wound up being a study of the effect of age on that drug's efficacy. This is a normal progression of experimental investigation in science, but it's not difficult to interpret it as being incorrect or even moronic in your scientific predictions.

It can be really painful to admit that something is difficult for you, even more so when the people around you, your peers, don't seem to have the same troubles. We're all competing for the same grant money, recognition, and success. So you don't say anything about your struggles, you don't ask for help, and something that is a frequent and necessary task in your scientific endeavors turns into a monster of an undertaking. At least it did (and still can) for me.

The too frequently unspoken truth in science is that as a group, we all rise and fall together (in a lab, in a research group, in a department, in a university, in a field, etc). If one of us makes a major breakthrough in methodology or technique, all of us might benefit from it. If one of us secures funding, there's more support for the rest of the team, or another piece of equipment. If one of us expands their professional network to include rich or powerful people, all of us might now have a powerful friend-of-a-friend.

Putting together a great team of a lab is important for each member's benefit. This is true for both social and professional climate, but I'm talking specifically about professional development. For the sake of the team, each member should seek to be open, considerate, thoughtful, and dedicated. It needs to be a safe place to ask for help or advice without fearing judgement and persecution. It allows its members to play to their strengths, and others to support them with their own, symbiotically.

In science, as in life, it's best to forgive yourself for your failings, and move the fuck on, preferably with your friends.

Baby, watch your back

Did you know you could search online your and your colleagues' salaries if you work at a state-funded institution? Me neither. Not until recently.

I noticed something when I searched for my salary and the salary of the other postdoc in my lab. We finished our PhDs within two months of each other, and I joined the lab roughly a month after he started. I come from Psychology, he from Physiology. We both wanted to join a lab that was out of our comfort zone, so we converged on adult hippocampal neurogenesis as our focus. He's an awesome person and I have mad respect for him as a person and a scientist.

And his yearly salary is $1,000 more than mine.

I'm curious why this is the case, as the most obvious difference between us is our genders. I haven't come up with another convincing factor in this discrepancy.

Baby, watch your back. I'll be watching mine much more closely in the future.

*Edited: The title is actually a reference to Nellie McKay's song "Baby Watch Your Back" but it's not on Youtube and here's another one of her amazing songs.

Dare the plane to crash, redeem the miles for cash when it starts to dive

The people who do the neuroscience are the least appreciated and nurtured resource in science.

Here's why:

We never bothered to map out success.
Few labs have documented, readily available, and shared protocols. This usually means that people learn technique from an oral tradition. Strangely, oral tradition is an inexact method and seldom lends a deeper understanding of technique that a career scientist needs to troubleshoot, should things go awry (as they usually do).

Superiors/senior scientist advisors seldom establish clear goals for success for more junior scientists. Sure, projects come and go, but more long term goals (18- or 24-month long, or even 4- or 5- year long career-related landmarks) might lend better career perspective for scientists who frequently can't think far beyond the current experiment.

We expect a level of devotion that's religious to qualify for respect.
Unless you're an undergraduate (and sometimes even that won't help), your PI expects you to be at the bench during business hours and toiling on everything else before and/or after that work. Usually more.

People who pass on family commitments or personal needs in the name of scientific work wear these sacrifices like a badge of honor, whereas someone who strives to achieve a work-life balance is considered less dedicated.  Recently, a co-worker of mine declared that they had to leave work early, at 5 p.m., to "babysit." I couldn't help but scoff. "I don't think it's babysitting if it's your own child," I mused.

I've been involved in roller derby since my third year of graduate school (that's nearly four years, including the two years I've been in my postdoc). Both of my superiors have reacted to my involvement in that community like it's the most insane thing they've ever heard. When I told one about making the team, he reacted like I had just told him that I was from outer space.

Professional conferences and workshop cruelly test your endurance in front of your peers (read: competition). For example, the annual meeting for Society for Neuroscience starts on a Saturday and runs through Wednesday. Talks start at 8 a.m. each day, and continue for 5 to 60 minutes, with more than a dozen ongoing sessions as any given time. Posters are presented in shifts, with hundreds simultaneously available for viewing. At 5 p.m., the at-conference bustle largely ends, but socials, meetings, lectures, and socializing (i.e., drinking) commence and continue into the morning hours. There are also several programs/events that precede or follow that main event. A couple of years ago, I spent a whole week at the SfN annual meeting in Washington, DC. It was so grueling that I skipped the last day of the conference in favor of spending the rainy day writing a manuscript and considered it a day "off."

We suck at communicating, but especially "thank you."
Everyone's been busy in the lab, using up the aliquot of this, the last of that, and spilling it on here. Sometimes, you fail to replace things or clean up after yourself before someone else also needs that resource. Both parties have the choice to be classy team players or unnecessary dickheads about the situation.

Dealing with equipment or facility issues can be a comedy of errors as each lab member independently discovers the issue or missing resource. A scientist could be royally screwed if they haven't accordingly planned ahead (which is probably most).

Periodically, the PI tries to show their appreciation for the lab team by providing food or drinks. It'd feel more meaningful if there was any real forethought, creativity, or commitment to it. Sure, they bought the food, but seldom is the act concurrently presented with an actual "thank you." It feels more like a tribute to an angry god than a team coming together to celebrate the group's efforts.

Team building and respect for one's peers is heavily undervalued and largely nonexistent.
Scientists, who appear to have a higher incidence of social awkwardness than the general population, work in groups that are hardly encouraged to communicate with one another. Without careful moderation, they won't actively challenge that difficulty. There needs to be a leader for or in the lab itself, aware of the social and functional culture of the lab. The chaos of every-awkward-(wo)man-for-themselves can easily devolve into shitty science work.

As a behavioral neuroscientist who works with operant chambers, I needed to quickly build up a competent crew of undergraduate assistants to help with the testing so that I could dedicate more time to the other things I need to learn, master, and accomplish as a postdoc. I solicited, interviewed, and trained an army of assistants with which I am excited to work everyday. It's a ton of front-end work and double checking that if implemented properly, pays major dividends in team member contributions. Because of them, I am frequently able to accomplish twice as much work as I would on my own and their efforts are a major factor in my scientific throughput. I get the feeling that my PI wouldn't agree with me, however, despite requisitioning my most senior assistant to take over a project dropped by someone under his own supervision.

Thinking is seldom considered to be productive, and haphazardly doing without thinking is generally promoted by the get-it-done-yesterday culture of science.
It wasn't until my fourth year of graduate student that an advisor demonstrated the importance of reading and thinking. It blew my mind! I had been focusing all my efforts on doing science with very little reading or understanding of science to guide it. Too few advisors and mentors encourage thinking about science in a creative way, especially when that time could be spent doing science.

I love having young science minds around me in the lab because I can't possibly espouse their worldview after 7 years of scientific devotion. Too few scientists solicit, or even value, the viewpoint or opinions of their fellow scientists. As a behavioral neuroscientist for seven years, I have developed firm opinions about how to get the best possible behavioral data out of my animals (obey their light cycles, avoid wearing or using perfumed products, approach animals with a calm, loving, but firm hand). Not that anyone would ask, however, so good luck with doing a cognitive task at the cusp of animals' day-night cycle while sporting that Axe body spray.

Likewise, my colleagues have strengths in techniques and fields that I don't know anything about. I wish asking for their help or opinion didn't feel so much like a confession of idiocy, even though it is completely normal and reasonable that I'm not the foremost expert in everything I do. Isn't having more smart people attacking a challenge better than fewer? Problem solving can be a funny thing - a novice could approach a problem with creative insight that a specialist in that field might not observe. Likewise, an expert might understand limitations with precision that can help modify a solution to fit the parameters at hand. Now that's fucking teamwork!



The only scientists you see working alone are in movies or TV, and they are generally "mad genious" scientists, and not in a good way (THERE'S AN ENTIRE WIKIPEDIA PAGE??!). I can think of villains  whose desire for fame, money, or power drove reasonable people to extreme ends. Sure - real science isn't a Hollywood movie, but it's also not completely unlike its depiction in films, either.

I firmly believe that while science is an academic endeavor, it is too seldom considered to be a group or team venture. I think failing to recognize and act upon this can make good, rigorous, and thoughtful scientific work more difficult to accomplish, and we already have enough barriers to that outside of what we scientists can directly control.