Food

Summer Kitchen & Bake Shop (Berkeley)
Dona Tomas (Oakland)
Taqueria Cancun***
Saha***
Mission Chinese
Outerlands***
Two Sisters Bar & Books
State Bird Provisions***
Jasper's Corner Tap & Kitchen
Shalimar
Kusinia Ni Tess
Tacolicious
Out the Door
King of Thai Noodle House
Humphry Slocombe***

Coffee

Cole Coffee (Oakland)***
Blue Bottle
Ritual***
Sight Glass
Trouble
Philz

Cocktails

The Graduate (Berkeley/Oakland border)
The Library
Wilson & Wilson
Trick Dog***
Two Sisters
Jasper's
Rye
Swig
Mosto
Rickhouse
Burritt Room***
Bourbon & Branch

1. Holy shit, I'm going up for tenure in 3 years. I don't even know what to do with this information except to keep doing ALL THE THINGS. Like, every fucking thing I can. To date, I have applied for seven grants of varying denominations (awarded 1, denied 4, still waiting on 2), published one tiny little review with my technician, and created and taught two undergrad courses. I have a fully functioning lab, with a technician, a post-doc, and two grad students, who are all working hard and getting along well. I think this is pretty good, but I know my department would like to see me publish actual research this year. We have a couple of different data sets now that could probably be a couple of small papers, but I keep putting them off to write grants, which have deadlines. This summer, they simply have to get out.

2. I feel like most of my job right now is to be famous. Is that a weird thing to say? Maybe. I said this to my mom and she was like, "why do you want to be famous?" with this disappointment in her voice, like after all these years she was realizing that she had raised a shallow fame whore. But I said, "it's not that I WANT to be famous, it's that I think I kind of HAVE to be famous if I want any chance at having this be my career forever." What I mean by this is that I'm pretty sure a lot of my future success is going to depend on whether people remember my name when they review my grant applications and manuscripts and put together symposia panels. To this end, I am really kicking the networking up a notch. Being brave, talking to the fancy pants people at meetings if I have the opportunity; forging new collaborations, and following up on interactions. So far, I'd say this is going quite well, and for what it's worth, the feeling that I am actively remaining part of a larger scientific community is quite excellent. There's a lot of alone time when you're a new professor, especially in a department that's pretty different from those in which you trained--it's nice to be reminded that the world is not wholly going on without you.

3. The best people you can know are those just slightly ahead of you. I know I just said that thing about talking to fancy pants people, but the reality is that the most useful connections you can make are those with folks who are only moderately senior to you. They are perfect: they have their shit together, but also are not so far removed that they've forgotten what it's like to be in your shoes. They are a magical combination of sympathy and wisdom, and they are better connected than you are. Moreover, they are the ones planning symposia panels. Seek them out, and pay attention to everything they say, seriously.

4. The leaky pipeline (or something) for women is alive and well. I've realized that if I actually crunch the numbers, I can think of exactly three other women in my general field who competed for and accepted TT offers in the last few years, while the number of men is probably at least 3 times that. At the Very Exclusive Conference I attended last December I was happy to find that I knew kind of a lot of people, until I realized that almost all of them were men, and if I joined a group of dudes just standing around talking, there was this weird moment where everyone was like, "OK, I guess we should find something else to talk about besides how much we love our penises. Did you see the latest Deisseroth?"

5. Until you are 65 and donning nitrile gloves four times a day to empty and clean your spouse's nephrostomy bags, do not even begin to think you know the depths of true love.

If you answered "yes" and "yes" to the previous questions, keep reading.

There's little that warms the cockles of my heart more than bringing together people who would like to meet each other, but lack the motivation and organizational skills required to make it happen. As you know, I've been organizing the BANTER parties at the Society for Neuroscience meetings for the last 3 years, and I thought it might be about time to branch out. To test the Experimental Biology waters, I thought I'd just tell you guys that I'm going to be at a bar at a certain time, and we'll see who shows up and work from there in the future.

Now, I grew up in the northeast, and Boston and I have a long and colorful history. I may talk a lot of trash, but there is one thing I'll give Boston, and that's that it's got a fair amount of really cool old stuff. One of the coolest really old things in Boston is the Liberty Hotel, which is an old prison that was converted into a swanky boutique hotel. The lobby is absolutely stunning, with what's got to be a 60-foot cathedral ceiling, enormous macabre iron chandeliers, and other preserved prison-y details. So let's go hang out there! It's right off the Charles/MGH stop on the Red line of the T (Boston's adorable excuse for a subway)--just 3 stops from South Station, which I believe is the closest one to the Convention Center.

Here are the details, in easy-to-digest form:

What: Drinks with me!
When: 6:30 pm, Monday, April 22
Where: Liberty Hotel, 215 Charles Street
Who: YOU AND ME, BABY!

One thing to note about the Liberty - I am not talking about Alibi, its lower-level bar/club thing, and I am not talking about Clink, its upper-level bistro thing. I am talking about hanging out in the actual lobby, which has its own bar and is up the escalator when you first walk in. OK? Try not to get lost!

Leave a quick note in the comments here or say something to me on twitter just so I can get a sense of how many people might show up. Obviously if you happen to live in the Boston area (I hear there are one or two research institutions there) but are not attending the meeting, you are of course welcome to join us.

I hope to see you there!

But when it comes to writing and reviewing manuscripts, I find that there's quite a bit of emphasis on the discussion. "The authors did not discuss the implications of their findings in light of the work of Fancypants et al 1997, 2000, and 2010a & b," "The authors overstate the clinical relevance of the results from Experiment 2," "The authors' explanation for their findings in experiment 3 are unfounded." I myself have been that reviewer--the one who demands that the authors dedicate at least 150 words to speculation (with citations, of course) on why they failed to replicate Generally Accepted Phenomenon. But what do I care? Am I on the authors' thesis committee or something? Do I reject the data if the authors can't come up with an acceptable reason for why things turned out the way they did?

It seems to me that in general, the discussion section IS like a thesis defense: are you enough of a scholar about your own work to warrant publication of the work itself? Do you know the literature, have you thought about alternate interpretations, can you see where your work is taking the field? If the answer is "no," then the paper must be revised and resubmitted until it's deemed suitably "discussed." But honestly, does anyone besides the people who review your manuscript give a shit about these things?  In other words, if a poor interpretation of one's own work is made, but nobody reads it because it was made in the discussion, does it make a sound?

But despite her sub-par living conditions, Dr Becca was generally a happy person, because she loved being a neuroscientist. She loved designing experiments and training future neuroscientists, and even teaching undergrads a little bit. One of the most important parts of her job, however, was to convince some HIGHLY INTELLIGENT and EXTREMELY GOOD-LOOKING, NOT TO MENTION WORLD-RENOWNED scientists to tell the government to give her money so that she could continue to be a neuroscientist. So she thought and she thought and she leaned back in her purportedly ergonomic desk chair that still managed to give her a mild case of sciatica until she had an idea.

And this idea--well, it was a pretty great idea. The work that Dr Becca so eloquently proposed to do, and that she illustrated so well in clearly-labeled color figures, would open up a whole new line of research that could continue for decades. Moreover, it had clear clinical relevance, in that it could help treat an underserved population that increasingly suffers from an exceptionally topical illness. It was, you might say, a perfect proposal with respect to the goals set forth in the RFA.

Dr Becca sent her great idea through a series of tubes to the DC Metro area, where the idea sat for nearly five and a half months. In the interim, Dr Becca attended several scientific meetings, got married, hired a post-doctoral fellow, created a new course for the undergrads at her university, wrote a review article, went on a honeymoon to Europe, had said review article get accepted, and watched her first grad student kick ass presenting his Masters' thesis.

And then finally, just 4 days before Dr Becca's [redacted] birthday, the INDIMIDATINGLY BRILLIANT and SERIOUSLY ATTRACTIVE scientists met to talk about Dr Becca's idea, as well as a few others. And on that day, the EMINENT, WISE, and EFFORTLESSLY STYLISH scientists agreed that it was essentially an objective truth that Dr Becca's idea was the best in the group, and they gave her a priority score and corresponding percentile that was in no uncertain terms well below payline for her IC.

Several months later, Dr Becca's institution gladly accepted the award on her behalf, and Dr Becca went on to continue her career as a paradigm-shifting but remarkably modest neuroscientist until the world was rid of mental illness. And as for the NOBEL-DESERVING, DORIAN GRAY-YOUTHFULNESS LEVEL scientists that made it all happen? Well, they all lived long, luxurious lives, devoid of health problems until they died peacefully in their sleep with their loved ones by their side, and several buildings erected in their name at their respective alma maters.

THE END.

******

Sweet dreams, you sexy beasts of study section. Please be kind tomorrow.

But I did somehow manage to land this gig, and when I started in my new position, I applied for an R21 right away, which was funded. And with that, I thought maybe I can do this after all! I have overcome my badness at applying for things. Since then, though, I've applied for 5 grants and two travel awards. Three grants are still out for review, but 2 grants and the 2 travel awards have come back negative, and I can feel myself starting to lose faith again in my ability to compete for things. I know that this is silly, and that there are certain general principles of probability at work here, but still.

The reality is that most of us get way more rejections than acceptances, but we can lose sight of how normal that is, and allow ourselves to spiral down into self-doubt, which is v bad! So please use the comments here as an open thread to lament about all your recent rejections, triages, non-invitations to submit full applications, etc. It will make you feel better, I promise!

And to make you feel further better (or at least hungry), here's a picture from my honeymoon. This is the view from our flat in Aix-en-Provence. We ate more cheese on that trip than I have probably eaten in the last 6 months combined.

Travel circumstances aside, I am SO excited for this trip. The 12 days we're gone will be the longest stretch of vacation time I've taken since before starting grad school, and the longest stretch of time that J and I will have spent together since I moved to NJC in July 2011. It is, to put it mildly, long overdue.

In anticipation of the upcoming lune de miel, I have been working my butt off this semester. In the past 7-8 weeks, I wrote and submitted 3 grant proposals and a review article, started teaching a brand new class of my own creation (my 2nd!), and brought a post-doc on board. I am exhausted, but happy. It took a little while to ramp up, but the lab's moving along at a really nice clip now, we have some super cool data, and we are just about ready to start writing two bona fide research papers!

It's all very exciting, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, here; before all that, J and I are going to eat the shit out of France. We will eat without shame; we will eat without fear. We will eat like there's no tomorrow, like it's going out of style, and like our lives depend on it (they do).  Brie. Bouillabaisse.  Steak au poivre. Croissants. Macaroons. Escargots. Haricots verts. Moules. Frites. Royale w/ cheese (JK). 

Au revoir, mes amis! And wish us bonne chance on the upgrade attempt.

How many of you have seen these 6 little characters and felt The Rush? Admit it--it's better than Christmas morning, your first kiss*, and good bourbon all rolled into one! You want to run through the halls of your Classy Institution screaming, "I HAVE DATAAAAAAAA!!!!" - and you very well might do that.

But here's the thing we often forget: p > 0.05 is data, too. And having more significant differences doesn't necessarily mean your paper's going to a fancier journal. Earlier this evening, I caught whiff of a conversation on twitter, started by Sciencegurl, and it made me a little sad. She tweeted:

 

When the kind folks of twitter asked her what happened, she responded:

And that just about broke my heart. PIs, do you understand that negative data might not be the result of  your trainees being bad at science, but instead perhaps there simply are no differences?

Here in the Laboratory of Neuroscience and Awesomeness, we are getting to the point where we've collected what can only be described as a shit ton of data, and it is my job as PI to help my trainees make sense of it all. Their natural inclination is to hope that experimental and control groups are different in every measure possible, but that is of course not how things pan out, ever. For example, we recently had some interesting behavioral data, and so I asked one of my grad students to process tissue from the brains of the animals from that study (to me, running a behavioral experiment without looking at the brains in some capacity is like roasting a chicken and then throwing out the bones without making a stock. So much potential goodness to squeeze out!) So grad student worked extremely hard to do this --she worked long hours, all through winter break, and well into this semester. She trouble shot, she took gorgeous images, and she handed me a spreadsheet  full of raw data that I analyzed in every way I could think of, from every angle imaginable. But no matter how much I squinted or turned my head sideways, there were simply no significant differences between groups.

Would it have been fun if we had found differences? Of course. Does the fact that this data set happened to turn out negative mean we won't include it when we write it up? Fuck no. Like it or not, these data are part of our narrative, and it's our job as scientists to think hard about what both positive AND negative data mean for the story we're trying to tell. Not everything may fall perfectly into place the way we'd originally imagined it, but half the fun of being a scientist is trying to wrap your brain around the data you have, and coming up with a new interpretation of what's going on. Don't let your data make you sad, and for fuck's sake don't take it out on your trainees--make your data work for you. Because after all, the data are what the data are.

* truth be told, my first kiss was not all that pleasant, because braces.

I highly recommend you watch the original ad first if you haven't already seen it, so that you can fully appreciate the extent of my parody skillz. Enjoy!

One thing (of many...so many) that's been particularly challenging in this new gig has been instilling in my lab members a sense of both independence and team spirit. It's incredibly important to me that my grad students feel like they each own their projects, and that the work that they do is part of their personal education and career growth. But I also want them to feel like they're part of something bigger--that in the end, the common themes running through our research mean we're on some level all working for the same goal. Toward the first end, I try to find regular time to chat with everyone one-on-one, sometimes through a scheduled meeting, and sometimes just by wandering into the lab. Toward the other, we have lab meeting. But how can you know what lab meeting should look like? There are so many kinds.

1. The seminar. In grad school, I did a rotation in a lab whose weekly lab meetings were huge, 35-person affairs. Catered. Each week, one of the members of the 3 or 4 labs that participated gave a full hour presentation of their recent work, followed by another half hour of heated discussion. People stressed for months preparing for their talk as if it were a prestigious speaking engagement. Luckily, as a rotation student who couldn't get anything to work, I was exempt.

2. The I-guess-maybe-we-should-have-a-lab-meeting. The lab I ultimately chose for my thesis work did not really "do" lab meetings. Once in a while we'd try to get it going, but it was mostly just to work out animal testing schedules with the technicians. It never really stuck.

3. The rapid fire. My post-doc mentor had a lot of administrative duties that kept him out of the lab most of the time, so our weekly lab meetings were generally a time for him to catch up on what equipment was currently broken. Once in a while someone would present some cool new data they had, but more often than not it was just people going around the conference table accusing each other of leaving oil on the confocal objectives.

4. The journal club. My post-doc sabbatical lab was small enough that our PIs could give us the face time we needed during the week, and so our weekly lab meetings were primarily used as an opportunity to have journal club, with a smattering of data presentation here and there. This worked out really well for me, since the focus of the lab was somewhat outside my general repertoire, so it helped catch me up on the literature.

Currently, our lab meetings are mostly journal club-style. I think that first and foremost, it's important that we as a group get together and talk about science, whatever shape that might take. We usually use 10-15 minutes in the beginning to talk about whatever's been going on in the lab during the week, make sure that any issues that arose are being dealt with. Then, all lab members--grad students, tech, and undergrads, rotate weeks presenting a journal article of their choice, which has honestly been one of my favorite parts of this job. Providing nothing majorly falls apart, we should be able to start having some data presentations soon, which will be exciting. Also, I find that I give a lot of pep talks. Do other new PIs find this, too?

Lab meetings are certainly not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, but still I'd love to know what you've found to be successful or not. Comment away!