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

Apparently the field is doing pretty well (click on the link above). However, it’s still pretty hard on folks just getting started.

Why doesn’t it surprise me that pharmacologists make a lot more than developmental biologists?

Jim

Yesterday I participated in a very interesting discussion at the Deans and Directors group about how we talk about research here at George Mason. One interesting idea was the notion of creating compelling narratives for the research that goes on at the University. The idea is to relate different threads of Mason research so that they integrate with one another to form a coherent whole.

Example: Mason has a a very strong cancer biology research program along side its neurosciences focus (the one I write so much about in this blog). How might those two strengths be integrated in one story?

A cell biology professor of mine at the University of Michigan used to say (tongue-in-cheek) that when we really understand the process of learning and memory (in the brain) it’ll turn to be a more regulated form of cancer.

She was way ahead of her time!

She was referring of course to the fact that cancer cells (like neurons) are remarkably plastic. As cancer cells metastasize they round up and loosen their grip on their surrounding substrate. This physical change can be thought of as a kind of cellular plasticity. Similarly, even into adulthood, neurons have the ability to change their physical shape as the brain “rewires” in response to stimuli from the external environment. Turns out that the molecules subserving these changes (both in cancer cells and in neurons) are often he same shady characters. One of them (protein kinase C) was originally discovered in the context of cancer, but actually has turned out to be of tremendous importance in brain learning and memory!

So the above narrative is an example of how one can weave together two different research stories (from quite different fields) into a coherent narrative. The cancer cells and the neurons are linked together in their molecular processes.

It’s possible to do this for many fields of research. At Krasnow, with our research programs covering neuroscience, cognitive psychology and computer sciences, this is especially important.

Jim

Turns out red wine might be as effective as caloric restriction in prolonging life!

NATURE has the report. I’ve linked to the NY Times article.

Jim

Money quote from Nature:

In a speech at the neuroscience meeting, NIH institute heads acknowledged the inevitable outcome: the success rate for grant applications across the agency dropped from 31% in 1998 to 23% last year (see graph). Next year, this is expected to fall to 19%. “We have really good grants that we can’t afford to pay,” says Story Landis, head of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “The demand took off just as the NIH budget was landing.”

An interesting finding from Budinger et al. in Neuroscience: the find that A1 cortex has anatomical connections which suggest multimodal sensory processing.

Jim