It is being deployed across the entire waterfront of science from particle physics to ecology. We use it to replace routine human labor, adapt models, direct autonomous vehicles and to reconfigure sensors in response to interesting events. There is still a human in the loop, but one can see the not so distant future where the artifact will be creating the hypothesis and testing it experimentally.

From the performance of the most recent Large Language Models, it’s not such a far jump to imagine accurate Wikipedia entries by AI authors–although, there is always the alignment problem: what is to stop the AI from producing realistic-looking drivel, either accidentally or to fool us.

Sad to report the passing of my former deputy at NSF, Dr. Jane Silverthorne, a superb plant biologist.

As part of your short-list visit to campus, you can expect to be hosted for dinner usually at a nice restaurant (although it could be at a faculty member’s house). This will come at the end of what has already been a long day. Don’t relax. This dinner will be all work and no play. From a practical standpoint, it would be good if you have time to clean up a bit after your long day. If you brought something else to wear that is appropriate to the occasion, then changing into those clothes would be helpful. If you order, try to order food for which there is no chance of it spilling on to you or others (red Italian sauces should be off the list). Aim for a price point that is in the middle of the menu and that doesn’t stand out. If you have special dietary needs, those should he communicated to the host before you travel. You may be offered an adult beverage (i.e. alcohol) either before or during dinner. Politely decline it. The offer is, among other things, a test of your judgement for which there is only one correct answer. You will need to be completely sober during the dinner. Note that the other attendees may well imbibe a bit.

The dinner will be a continuation of the interview process. It may masquerade as convivial conversation, but it is not. Each opportunity for you to converse will be analyzed by the attendees for the key factors of: intelligence, fitting in and good judgement. All of these are considered to be necessary for the success in the search. Do not discuss politics or volunteer your political opinions. Do not monopolize the conversation. Try to actively listen to each person as they speak. Make eye contact with the other attendees as they are speaking. Often, it’s a good idea to feed their question back to them as a question in order to buy time to think and to make certain that you both are on the same page.

At the end of the evening, make certain to explicitly thank the host and the other attendees for their time and hospitality. And you aren’t off camera until you are back in your hotel room with the door closed. Don’t even think about going out afterwards.

So you’ve been invited to visit a campus as part of your job search. By definition, you’ve made the ‘short list’. Congrats. To prepare for your visit, you’ll need to have the following in your back pocket (meaning ‘in the can’): a job talk, an informal whiteboard talk, and the ability to actively listen to many different interviewer-stakeholders for a period extending beyond the workday going well into the evening. There is no room for messing up on any of these because the competition is extensive.

The job talk speaks for itself and a lot has been written about the subject. So, I’ll just add my own emphasis on never reading from your slides, keeping bulleted text to a minimum and ending the talk at the 45-50 minute mark to leave just the right amount of time for questions. I’d also remind readers to always cite the use of other’s graphics and to concentrate the talk on your own new data.

Less has been written about the informal whiteboard talk. In fact, a lot of candidates aren’t aware of its ubiquitous existence (in one form or another). This is the talk where you lay out (in outline form) the substance of your first grant proposal for sponsored research funding. First, all money is not equivalent. If you are in the natural or social sciences (including biomedical), I’d highly recommend that you lay out a proposal to either the NSF or the NIH. Your potential future colleagues will tend to view funding from those agencies as more prestigious and worthy than funding from other sources. Do I agree with that take? Definitely not, but that’s the current state of the academy so you should be aware. If you are going to outline an NSF proposal, that make a clear distinction between the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria. If you are outlining an NIH proposal, then organize the whiteboard talk as modular specific aims that, taken together, form a coherent flow chart. The key is that the ideas are novel, they align with the interests of the hiring department, and most importantly that your track record supports the likely success of the proposal.

Who will be your audience for this whiteboard presentation? It might be just the department chair or dean. Or it might be the entire search committee. In any case, this part of your day’s work is critical.

Next up we’ll cover stakeholder interviews and the dinner out.

In recent years, I’ve often advised post docs to look far beyond the academy, particularly in hard science fields where the skill sets can command high compensation packages in the private sector. However, there are a lot of folks for whom the lure of a tenure-track faculty position and the requisite freedom to pursue one’s own intellectual interests is too important. For them, I am writing these blog posts.

There are a number of gate posts to get through before a job offer appears. Some of them are obvious, some of them are occult. Let’s deal with the latter first: it is almost impossible to know when a recommender is in fact not recommending you. In my own career, I had one individual sheepishly admit after years that he had been anti-recommending me for junior faculty positions while leading me to believe otherwise. His grudge was fairly trivial–but it was enough for him to decide that a faculty job was not for me. So it’s extremely important to develop a coterie of individuals who you absolutely trust to back your job search to the hilt. As I tell my students: ask them face-to-face if they can write you an A+ recommendation. Usually that elicits the truth. And unless they agree to A+, they are off the list.

Another gate post is the Zoom, short-list, interview. This is the gatepost that gains you an invitation to visit campus. Most of us, even two years into a pandemic, are still not at our best on Zoom. And that’s even without technical glitches. So there is a lot of luck at this stage. Still, the key thing is to distill their questions into coherent and clear answers that signal two things: first, your collegiality and willingness to ‘play nicely with others’ and second, your potential for research productivity aligned with. where you see the hiring department’s strategic interests are. The latter of course requires some detective work on your part since this isn’t likely to be entirely obvious–although if you carefully read the job ad, there will probably be a clue. In any case, those are the two key items for the Zoom.

The visit to the campus is the most complex. It deserves its own blog post. Stay tuned.

The Fall semester is upon us. Sometime late in the term, the third anniversary of patient zero will be upon us. Life here in DC seems almost pre-pandemic these days: restaurants are full, traffic is impossible and our campus is filling up with students ready for in-person classes. Almost the same as 2020, but not fully. Zoom and its software twins are here to stay it seems. The office buildings are far from full and that means that small businesses which catered to the denizens of office blocks are hurting. Many have closed. The mask is still on many faces and seems to be still be a common piece of litter on city streets. And we are still awaiting both the next variant and the next booster. But socially, from what I’ve seen in my travels, the West seems to have moved on. The situation in Asia is less clear.

I’m teaching a class about managing large crises for our graduate students in public policy this semester. What happened with COVID is a perfect example of how bad management of a health crisis can be globally consequential–not only in terms of public health, but also economically. We need to very carefully consider retrospectively the pandemic from the standpoint of crisis management lessons because this won’t be our only rodeo. Climate disruption will only increase the frequency of zoonotic transfer from animal viral reservoirs to humans.

From Science Magazine, this week, here. One research thread that our team has been pursuing is how the Space Economy might play out. SpaceX is certainly a driving force for that evolution right now. We have been conditioned to think about how SpaceX’s heavy lift and low cost might play out in terms of resource exploitation and solar system colonization, but it’s also worthwhile thinking about how such capabilities might catalyze science.

This coming Spring semester, I’ll be teaching a course along these lines. Stay tuned.

Will be carried on Artemis I as described here. This is important because humans will have to traverse deep space to get to Mars (and beyond) and the radiation environment can be extremely challenging. If humans are going to join the robots that are exploring Mars, we are going to have to figure out how to protect them as they transit from Earth. Elon says he wants to die on Mars, preferably not on impact. Well, he to make it there first.

Yesterday, I was in a meeting with work colleagues in the pre-pandemic style: in person. There was coffee. There was the usual round robin introduction segment. There were at least three other NSF alumni besides myself and the subject matter was fairly banal–that is not management of a crisis. So it really felt a bit like my old life running NSF’s biological sciences directorate, even though there were a few masks in the room. To complete the illusion, my current building is about 4 blocks from the old NSF headquarters and so the view out the window was pretty comparable.

But of course, it’s not 2017. Office buildings here in Arlington Virginia are still conspicuously empty of people. The dog days of summer add to the ghost town feeling. Zoom calls are still the normative mechanism for bringing work colleagues together where the phrase “you’re muted” has become the most common utterance no matter the specifics of a particular meeting. Work has changed fundamentally and to my view, probably permanently.

I have colleagues who mostly work remotely–some from overseas–and I’m sure that’s fairly common. This is the case even for running laboratories: checking in on graduate students or postdocs and looking at their latest results does not require occupying the same space. Scientific teams can write proposals and manuscripts collaboratively in the cloud. Coming into the office for the mandatory 8:30AM meeting in the director’s office probably was close to obsolete even before the pandemic hit.

So what comes next? Actually why does anything need to come next? It could be argued that the greatest crisis here is localized to commercial real estate developers and that work life will continue more or less as it is, changed permanently by COVID, but not for the worse. Just different.

The background in this Guardian piece here and this Scientific American article here (hat tip NK). I wonder if we could automate this process of water sampling and microscopic analysis? And better yet, might we be able to ecologically predict such occurrences? These are two questions which have significant public health impact and at the same time might be enabled by the appropriate deployment of machine learning.