Well, another academic year is coming to a close this weekend with George Mason’s commencement exercises. This Saturday, 6803 students will be receiving degrees at Mason’s Patriot Center. The commencement speaker will be Scott Cowen, President of Tulane University.

For Krasnow, this has been a very active year: both in construction, the acquisition of our 3T MRI and changes among our faculty. I am really looking forward to welcoming Rob Axtell, Nathalia Peixoto and Jim Thompson as new principal investigators at the Institute with the commencement of the Fall term. And over the summer, I’ll be asking each of them to serve as guest bloggers at some point so as to describe their research foci. And we will have hired an MR Technician in the next couple of weeks–this individual will play the key role in making things work smoothly at our brain imaging center. I’d also like to welcome our new receptionist, Joey Carls.

Outside my office window today, the earthmoving equipment is filling the air with the sounds of diesel engines–we’re now hard at work on creating the extra 12,500 square feet of lab space that will enable Krasnow to continue its rapid expansion over the next five year period.

Tomorrow I leave for about a week in Scotland. We’ll give the blog a rest over that period and pick up where we left off when I return.

Jim

This time I link to our colleagues from Charlottesville for their excellent advice.

I have a couple of my own rules of thumb:

Be aware of the differential advantages of choosing someone who is quite junior (perhaps an assistant professor) vis a vis a more senior mentor who leads a large group.

The more junior mentor will have potentially much more time for the trainee, which is really extremely important for learning the basic skills of science, from experimental design through data analysis. However, because of their own usually untenured status, they may turn out to be extremely aggressive about first authorship. Thus there is potentially a situational competitiveness between trainee and mentor–a big negative.

The more senior mentor (aka a lab chief) will have much less time. She or he will tend to run the lab in a more delegated fashion and perhaps lab meetings will be the only opportunity for face-to-face contact with the boss. In these situations, the lucky trainee will often connect with some senior post-doc in the lab who will de facto fulfill the “hands on” role of the more junior mentor described above. The good thing about these situations is that a more senior lab chief often has a much more generous attitude towards authorships and even promoting the independence of the trainee. Remember, this type of mentor already has attained significant success in their career and so there is little or no incentive to compete with the trainee for credit.

One other characteristic of the more senior mentor: they probably have the ability to pick up the phone and secure the trainee a well-placed next job. This of course is very important.

Jim

One of the most serious responsibilities in science is mentorship–that is the professional training (including above and beyond science) that a senior investigator ethically owes to one’s trainees. I link above to University of Michigan’s standards, which I think worked pretty well for me.

A key component is the notion of appropriately crediting a trainee’s research accomplishments with the overall goal of evolving that person’s credibility as an independent investigator–absolutely critical for the trainee successfully competing for an academic job. This obligation can occasionally be viewed by the mentor as in conflict with hers or his own self interests as a scientist. When this conflict intersects with the inherent power relationship between mentor and trainee, it can result in serious trouble.

My only advice here is for trainees to be exceedingly careful in choosing their mentors. Once the “trouble stage” has been reached, things rarely turn out optimally. In the next post, some simple rules of thumb for choosing a mentor.

Jim

It was nice to fly into Dulles late yesterday afternoon over the green piedmont of Northern Virginia. The day before I had a great meeting at Caltech’s Broad Cafe with Andy Cameron of The Biological Bulletin’s editorial board who is working on the Sea Urchin Genome Project–nearly finished. The Sea Urchin is a remarkable model system, not only for developmental biology but also for those of us looking a protein kinase C- (PKC) mediated signal transcription in a simple system. What’s also interesting about the Urchin is that gene super-families often are reduced to a single member (PKC is an example of this). So we’re really looking forward to this annotated data when it comes out, probably over the summer.

Mid-week, I’m off to Scotland, for a few days of vacation.

Jim

Two great talks today:

Gerald Edelman talked about his notion of neural darwinism as a way
of understanding the function of neocortex. Highly mentioned in his
talk was the research of Krasnow alumnus Jeff Krichmar and his work
on the Darwin X robot. This is a robot that has a functioning model
of a hippocampus to navigate its way around the robot equivalent of
Morris water maze. Also cool, was NSI’s (click on the link above) Segway
Soccer Brain-Based Device–which destroyed the CMU Robot in a human
robot team version of soccer.

The other brilliant talk was led by Henry Markham who is a close
collaborator with Krasnow’s own Giorgio Ascoli. Markham is using
IBM’s Blue Gene Super-Computer to essentially reconstruct (at an
extraordinary level of biological fidelity) a cortical column.
Driving Markham’s work is the notion of a recipe for a cortical
column built up by using massively parallel patch recordings of
neocortical neurons from living cortical columns. More on this work
at http://bluebrainproject.epfl.ch/people.htm.

Tomorrow another half day of talks and then a quick jet ride down to
Pasadena and Caltech.

Jim

Today I’m off to what promises to be a very interesting conference on cognition at IBM’s Almaden Conference Center in San Jose (click on the link above). Then a quick jump down to LA to meet with one of my editors for The Biological Bulletin (www.biobull.org). It’ll be enjoyable to focus on science entirely for the next several days–although, as a native Californian, I can’t promise I wont wax somewhat on the Golden State.

Jim

Well, it’s been delivered and here’s a couple of pictures. Congrats
especially to the Siemens team, and the co-chairs of our neuro-
imaging core: Professors Kalbfleisch and McCabe. It’s also really important to thank all of the Krasnow staff and friends, who made it possible for us to put in place a top-flight neuroimaging capability in such a short period of time.

Jim

So tomorrow, around about 2PM, the MRI should be craned into the current Krasnow Laboratory Facility. In what amounts to a giant-size Faraday cage, the scanner will be brought to life over the next several weeks and we should thereafter–perhaps this is the right phrase: be in business. We’ll have video of the more dramatic aspects of the delivery on the main Krasnow web site and I’ll link to it as soon as it’s available.

In other news, Saturday was the last day of classes for the semester and this blog, consequently nears the end of its first year. I’ll have some thoughts on the just passing academic year and what lies ahead, very soon.

Jim

An interesting link to a C-Net Story on folks who are producing a “sim-city” like version of creating a peace from a situation of violence. Of special interest to our colleagues interested in social complexity.

Money quote:
“The field of public diplomacy in games is the latest entry in the larger serious-games movement, in which government, universities, the health care industry and other institutions are beginning to use games to teach new concepts.”

Jim

Another academic year is rapidly drawing to a close. For me this is the end of my eighth year as Krasnow Director. As with all jobs that you’ve been in for a while, this one now has its seasons: the quiet of summer, the frenzy of the fall followed by the holiday break and then the renewed push towards commencement in May. In a sense, these seasons serve as punctuation marks for the academic year and allow for a pacing of activities.

This change in academic season we are losing two valued Krasnow colleagues as they move to another institution, but we are also gaining three new principal investigators in their place (more on the new arrivals in subsequent posts). Time moves on and the Institute evolves along with our University. Overall, the Krasnow Institute continues to grow and I expect this trend to actually accelerate over the next years.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy the season of the cap and gown and prepare for summer’s change of pace.

Jim