Our latest publication, here.

So you’ve got yourself a Zoom appointment with a scientist who may be able to help your career. If you are able to, through your college or university (i.e. you can initiate a Zoom call of an hour in length), offer to create the Zoom link yourself. Do be on time (this is critical) and be certain to have a professional appearance for the camera.

As you begin the call, use the words “informational interview” to describe your goal for the conversation. This term conotes that there are no expectations of an offer (job other educational) from the scientist. You will be probably asked to introduce yourself: what this means is to state your name and then to give a short (no longer than 2-3 minute) backgrounder on your undergraduate education to date, your major, what science experiences (including courses and labs) might be relevant. You statement stops with a sentence or two on how you discovered the work of this person (your target) and what papers of hers/his you have read. At this point you get ready to listen.

What is required is active listening. This means engaging visually with the person via the camera. Nodding when appropriate and taking notes so that you can ask intelligent questions. This is really key. The scientist on the other end of the Zoom needs to be able to “feel” your attention. More on this in the next blog post.

In this blogpost, I describe the most important step: making individual contact with each of your faculty targets. First let me start out with the don’ts:

• Do not use social media of any kind
• Do not text
• Do not even think about using a template

First, use determine the work email of your faculty targets. So this means, the email associated with the place that employs them. For example, in my case, you would want my George Mason University email. I leave it as an exercise on how to get that piece of information, but Google usually works well. Second, you are going to compose a long email to each of your faculty targets in which you will primarily communicate your knowledge of their scholarship/research and your ideas about what you think should be the ‘next experiment’ (Note, for non-bench type professors, this would be the next natural step of scholarly inquiry). Finally, you’ll communicate your interest in carrying out this research while presumably under their guidance as mentor/academic advisor or employer. Also, make clear that you would be overjoyed to do a Zoom informational interview with them at their convenience.

Note, I added nothing about yourself. That’s correct. At this stage, other than a cursory ‘I’m an undergrad at X University majoring in Y’, it’s not about you. Your sole goal in this communication is to convey in the clearest language possible that you are deeply familiar with their research and that you have been thinking about how to add value to their research work flow. When they circle back to you (and if you do this correctly, they surely will), that’s when you can talk about your self and your professional dreams/goals.

In the next blogpost, we’ll talk about your Zoom.

How to read those papers: very carefully. Start with Discussion section (last part of the paper). Read it to find out what new knowledge is being reported. Note the papers that have been cited to buttress the conclusions and plan to at least read the abstract of those papers. Now go back and read the paper from the beginning (starting with the title and author order/affiliations). For natural science papers (in general), the first author is the trainee who did the work. The last author is the professor/principle investigator (i.e. the person who you want to connect with). The middle authors are listed from left to right in order of the magnitude of their contributions to the work. Often there is a note at the end of the paper that lists who did what work by their initials. Note this also. As you read the paper pay particular attention to each figure and its associated figure legend. Those figures are the heart of the paper. It is particularly important to look at each figure critically. Does it actually support what the legend is purporting? Read the paper in its entirety twice. At the end of the last read, immediately write down for yourself what scientific questions have been ‘opened up’ by the publication of the paper. In other words, what should the next experiment be? You’ll need this for the next steps.

I learned this from my parents (who were both faculty at Caltech). It has continued to be good advice through the years. Step one is to decide who to connect with. Make sure your horizons are broad enough. Look beyond your major at your university. Look beyond your school. Connections, particularly as mentors, can be global. Realize that a more junior faculty person may have more time for you, but eventually has to actively put their own interests first–they are trying to get tenure. A more senior faculty member, might have less time, but have a more altruistic agenda. Above all, look for faculty members who are doing research/scholarship in areas that you could visualize yourself being passionate about.

Prune your list. It should be no larger than 10 individuals. You can prune your list based on various constraints: information that you’ve gleaned from other students/peers, googling and similar due diligence, interest in their research. Make certain that they are still actively publishing in the field you think you are interested in (people change directions). Then, make an appointment with google scholar or pub med and download the most recent two papers for each person on your list. Read those papers very carefully and make notes.

Stay tuned for the next blogpost.

Hat tip Tyler Cowen, the link is here. A couple of thoughts on this:

• I’m not sure NSF is aware of the crypto-side of this new ecosystem
• I’m pretty sure that university sponsored program offices aren’t either

So it may be quite challenging for established academic scientists to play in these sandboxes because of reporting/compliance requirements of the legacy funding systems. How do you make a list of your current and pending funding in bitcoin?

From independent AI researcher, John Wentworth, at the blog Less Wrong, here.

And John’s version of his bio with some gentle editing for salty language:

I’m an independent researcher working on AI alignment and the theory of agency. I’m 29 years old, will make about $90k this year, and set my own research agenda. I deal with basically zero academic bull&%$& – my grant applications each take about one day’s attention to write (and decisions typically come back in ~1 month), and I publish the bulk of my work right here on LessWrong/AF. Best of all, I work on some really cool technical problems which I expect are central to the future of humanity.

Many loyal readers know that I’m interested in the problem of supplying enough fixed nitrogen for our staple crops (rice, corn, wheat), none of which can fix nitrogen on their own. We are utterly dependent upon these food systems. Currently our planet is 2 billion humans over its natural carrying capacity and it is fertilizer (fixed nitrogen) that keeps us alive. The Haber Bosh Process, invented at the beginning of the 20th century, was the genius killer app of science and industrial design that has, to date, secured our food systems.

Unfortunately, there are some downsides. For one thing, agricultural runoff of fixed nitrogen pollutes our waterways and leads to toxic eutrophication. For another, the industrial process required to break the strong nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond of the abundant N2 in our atmosphere requires a lot of carbon-polluting energy and methane. Finally, one side effect of Haber Bosh was the efficient production of high explosives which the inventors deployed on the battlefields of World War One.

So it’s gratifying to see some real progress being made to clean up Haber Bosh. In this case, the big idea is to clean up the industrial chemistry. There are a lot of other potential approaches that folks are looking at–one of my favorites is the idea that our staple crops might secure a ‘deal’ with the microbes in the soil that can fix nitrogen: fertilizer in return for nourishment in the form of biochemical products that only a plant can make. We have an existence proof of this approach: legumes do this. And we know that, in the case of corn, there exists at least one distant non-domesticated ancestor that seems to have had this sort of win-win proposition in place.

Is here. Carlo is very smart and tends to think more clearly about COVID than a lot of folks. As Tyler Cowen would say, highly recommended.

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