This is pretty big news for those of us who collaborate extensively:

Money quote:

Beginning with research grant applications submitted for February 2007 receipt dates, the NIH will allow applicants and their institutions to identify more than one Principal Investigator (PI). The Multiple PI option will be extended to most research grant applications submitted electronically through Grants.gov (http://www.grants.gov/) using the SF424 R&R application package. Grant applications that will accommodate more than one PI beginning in February include: R01, R03, R13/U13, R15, R18/U18, R21, R21/R33, R25, R33, R34, R41, R42, R43, R44, and C06/UC6 (see http://era.nih.gov/ElectronicReceipt/strategy_timeline.htm). Some types of applications including individual career awards (K08, K23, etc.), individual fellowships (F31, F32, etc.), Dissertation Grants (R36), Director’s Pioneer Awards (DP1), and Shared Instrumentation Grants (S10) will not accommodate more than a single PI. The restriction to a single PI will be described in announcements for those programs.

There are several unpaid duties that go with being a scientist–among them, refereeing manuscripts for publication, serving on grant review “study sections” and of course writing recommendations. This last obligation is often the least understood.

There are several aspects to writing a recommendation letter that are clearly fraught with ambiguity:

First, given our lawsuit-friendly times, how frank should one really be? My opinion is that if you can’t write someone an outstanding support letter, it’s really better to tell them that up front so that they can go elsewhere. I realize that this might put other institutions and granting agencies at risk, but, following my principle, a really awful scientist is going to have a hard time getting any support letters.

Second: the phenomenon of “recommendation letter inflation”. It’s just a fact of life–the intense competition for jobs and grants probably pushes the trend, but if you really want the individual to get the job, you’d better not “condemn them with faint praise”. This goes against the grain for a lot of scientists, because in their papers, when discussing their data, any tendency towards over-hype is very properly held against one.

Third, it’s key to get across in the very first or second sentence, how long you have known the person you are recommending –and in what capacity. If this isn’t made clear, the entire letter becomes considerably less useful to the reader.

Finally, I always believe that it’s useful to step back at some point and indicate where the individual’s trajectory appears to be headed in your opinion– are they headed for the National Academy? Or maybe just towards being a solid scientific citizen (well funded and publishing in good journals).

Jim

There’s a great article by Clive Thompson in today’s NY Times magazine called “Rewiring the Spy”.

Money quote:

Today’s spies exist in an age of constant information exchange, in which everyday citizens swap news, dial up satellite pictures of their houses and collaborate on distant Web sites with strangers. As John Arquilla told me, if the spies do not join the rest of the world, they risk growing to resemble the rigid, unchanging bureaucracy that they once confronted during the cold war. “Fifteen years ago we were fighting the Soviet Union,” he said. “Who knew it would be replicated today in the intelligence community?”

Jim

With December at hand tomorrow, we find ourselves in the middle of the holiday season and this is a good time to wish all of those who are friends of the Institute, the very best of wishes! I was off site today, moderating a forum at the National Press Club on alternative sources for electrical power generation–hearkening back to my old days on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, my colleagues at the Institute were dealing with ventilation issues thanks to the complicated process of welding the bridge in place that connects the new building expansion with the old facility (if you can possibly call a 1997 building old). I’m pleased to report that the latest news is that it looks like we have the air issue licked! Or at least I hope so.

Jim

Today we began again a Krasnow tradition that dates back to the
Institute’s first year: our brown bag series. We came together a a
whole to review (think of a journal club gone wild) the special issue
of SCIENCE magazine devoted to “The Mind”. That issue came out in
October and was timed to coincide with the Society for Neuroscience
meeting in Atlanta. I wish I could adequately convey in words the
excitement, scientific depth and sheer collegial intensity of the
discussion. New graduate students spoke out with senior full
professors. Dopamine was compared to Acetylcholine. And prefrontal
cortex became “the last frontier”. It’s a great group at Krasnow:
mathematicians, neuroscientists, physicists, philosophers, imagers,
biochemists, cell biologists…..I could go on.

Jim

The leaves are now nearly off the trees (helped by a couple of rain
storms). The average temperatures are headed downwards and we drive home
in the dark–these are the signs of November at the Krasnow Institute.

In the meantime, the new building is going to be connected to the old
Krasnow facility this week with the demolition of a stair-tower–and
we’re very nearly “closed in” with the construction ready to continue
inside through the winter with move-in now scheduled for April.

In the next weeks there will be some major announcements concerning both
direct hires and the three open searches for new Krasnow PI’s to fill
our new space. I’m extremely excited with the quality of the science
that we’re looking at–the Institute will be qualitatively larger next
Fall, and not only in terms of space!

In the meantime, the functional stimuli apparatus is being installed in
the Krasnow 3T magnet and we’re working on agreements to secure combined
(i.e. fused) EEG, fMRI capabilities for our center.

Finally, we note that Rob Axtell will be taking over as acting-director
of Krasnow’s Center for Social Complexity during the remainder of
Claudio Cioffi’s year at the State Department as a Jefferson Fellow.

So stay tuned! There’s a lot going on.

Jim

Investigators at Penn used SPECT imaging to look at women subjects speaking in tongues. Quite a fascinating result (click on the link to the NY Times report).

Money quote:

[The] frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.

Interestingly the caudate nucleii had relatively lower activity.

Jim

As I often write at the beginning of advice blogging: today’s words
are not specific to George Mason University. Rather they are “rules
of thumb” for how life scientists in academia might plan their
professional lives. Today we deal with the topic of negotiating a raise.

First the obvious: there are two singular moments in your history
with a given academic employer when it is easiest to ask for more
money: before you sign on the dotted line to come and when you have a
viable offer on paper to leave. Outside of those transitory periods
of negotiating strength, the goal of bringing home a big raise
requires a bit more finesse.

The other point that needs to be made is that academic decision
makers typically are constrained by equity considerations in ways
that might be somewhat counter-intuitive and certainly counter to
pure meritocratic considerations. By equity considerations, I mean
not only those that might be in the purview of an EEO office, but
also the notion of equity with respect to other faculty salaries:
deans and chairs catch hot water for salaries that are too many
standard deviations outside the mean.

One powerful tool for negotiating a raise is building a case for why
it would be win-win. Raises can be win-win when a faculty member’s
sponsored research program is bringing in a significant part of the
salary and the raise effectively pulls that faculty member off the
job market. Sometimes this situation is called “golden handcuffs”. If
you think about it, the golden handcuffs can work both ways: the
academic employer can’t afford to lose the grants and contracts and
the employee becomes potentially too expensive relative to the market.

Another way to negotiate for a raise is….not to negotiate. Or
rather, to negotiate by means of engaging in what might be a job
search, but also might not. A hot faculty member who suddenly starts
taking a lot of trips to Cambridge or New Haven (or wherever) gets
noticed. Sometimes it makes sense for a nervous academic employer to
pre-emptively award a raise just to feel better about their ability
to retain particular talent.

But a sine qua non for all of this is to be valued by your academic
employer. And that above all (at least in the life sciences) means
developing a health extramurally-funded research program. So your
surest ticket to consistent raises is to be send in many grant
applications and to be reasonably successful at getting awards.

When you overtly ask for a raise, it’s a good idea to frame your
argument in such a way that it emphasizes the win-win, partnership
aspects and minimizes the notion that somehow you are being dealt
with unfairly. Because of their need to make decisions within the
context of equity, academic decision makers are often very threatened
by…equity arguments. For where an equity argument goes–to their
mind–a lawsuit can’t be very far behind.

Finally, realize that with tenure, incremental regular raises of
say…c. 5% quickly build up over the years.

Jim