Job Searching in Academia for Postdocs Part 1

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.

Pandemic update

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.

Starship for science…

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.

Deep space biology experiments

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.

Work Life After the Pandemic

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.

Harmful algal blooms…

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.

How to write a review paper…

The first task is to choose a topic that is both interesting and not recently reviewed. This requires some judicious use of Google Scholar. I think it’s also useful to have some demonstrable expertise in the area, although for most senior scientists, they are broad enough in their interests and knowledge to get by with a pretty shallow knowledge base. This first task is arguably the most important since it will drive everything else.

Once the topic is chosen, the next step is to conduct a first cursory review of the most important literature. In other words, you actually have to actively read some papers. This first review of the literature is not meant to be exhaustive. That comes later. Rather, its purpose is to prepare the ground for the next step: the review paper equivalent of a news ‘hook’. This is the notion of an insight that comes from a synthesis of the extant relevant literature. So if we were reviewing explainable AI, the hook might be that biological brains might provide both existence proof and likely explanation. If we were reviewing macrosystems approaches to ecology, the hook might be that robust standardization of measurements at continental-scale is required. The key is that the hook should be non-obvious, but emerges from a rigorous synthesis of the literature.

At this stage, the bibliography construction should begin using appropriate software. I use Zotero, but there are many good choices. The key function we are looking for is the ability to seamlessly grab a citation (and the full pdf) from Google Scholar and store it for later insertion into the manuscript document. This is the most important research stage of writing the review paper and it feeds back onto the prior ‘hook’ step since a full reading of the literature may change the results of the synthesis. That’s fine and is perfectly normal for the proper evolution of an excellent review. When this step is complete manuscript writing can commence.

I tend to write from an outline. This is one method for proceeding. It’s not the only one. If one does use the outline approach, the key is to outline the review so that the hook is never standing alone and obvious as the author’s opinion, but rather naturally emerges from the evidence presented in the paper in the mind of the reader. This is tricky. The reason for this subtlety is that review papers are not hypothesis or position papers.Their proper function is to lay out the evidence in such a way that synthesis emerges organically from the evidence. So the hook has to stay in your ‘mind’s eye’ and hidden from the printed page.

My parents, who were scientists themselves, taught me to use the scientifically formal passive voice for writing. This style was echoed during my training. Both my thesis advisor and post-doc mentor employed such a style. Today, we use a more active voice in our writing–not quite as informal as a blog entry, but certainly using more direct and simple language. Whatever the style, the key is to have citations accompany each claim. In review papers, we usually summarize a set of results in a sentence that contains the relevant paper’s first author as the subject and then the summary of what their scientific RESULTS revealed. So an example would be: “Olds et al (2020) found that soil exposed to fixed nitrogen had reduced bacterial diversity compared to controls.”

For a review paper, I complete the figures after I complete the text (I do the opposite for a regular research publication). Figures for a review paper can be adapted from other figures in the literature with written permission and explicit acknowledgement in the figure legend. The key is to adapt the figure so that it is not identical to the original. I choose figures to assist the reader in their synthesis laid out in the review. Once again, the idea is not to overtly lay out your hook, but rather to schematize the results from the literature in such a way that the reader gleans the hidden gem.

Finally, the bibliography can be built automatically by your software and inserted at the end of the document in the proper format. Congrats, you are ready to submit!

Undergraduate guide to connecting with faculty to advance your career (Blogpost #5)

The scientific training process in graduate school is fundamentally different than the classes and labs at the undergraduate level. A key part of graduate-level training is the active listening that I referred to in Blogpost #4. What this means is a regular spacing of questions (from you) relative to what you’ve just heard from the professor on the other end of the line. A good conversation of this sort can have as many as twenty or so of these talk-question intervals. As you progress in your training, the talk-question intervals regularly reverse: you’ll get the chance eventually to talk with your mentor asking the regular questions. This process works fairly similarly on-line (Zoom or Teams) as it does in person. The key however is that you have to carefully listen to the other person talking in order to ask a question (there is no single correct question) that meets muster.