Category Archives: The Life Scientific

Not a Giant

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And Andrew said “Yes, I agree and that’s exactly what Troy’s paper says”.

So its continued. Its been twice, maybe three times, in a matter of weeks that I’ve had the feeling that there are no good ideas left or that all of them have already been tested.  And it always seems that I was so close and yet so far  – the PNAS paper published in January 2013 exploring ‘my idea’; the newly encountered Biology Letters article that confirms my suspicions about some process or other (interesting how one tends to recall when ideas appeared in decent journals, no?). Its dispiriting to the burgeoning scientific spirit to get that rush of excitement, sketch out the idea and then – often while not even looking – find that someone has already confirmed it.

I can hear you, dear reader, telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself or closing the laptop, concluding that you have far more important things to worry about (Kids! Dinner! Papers! Game of Thrones!) than to listen to the whining of a graduate student.

I agree with you. There’s a seed of egotism behind these thoughts. How can I expect to think of a good, truly original idea or experiment given the sheer numbers of (far more intelligent & experienced) people that have come before me? Is it not the case that, even within one field, most scientists stand on the shoulders of a few giants, adding bricks to the towers distributed throughout the scientific landscape? I also suspect this creeping feeling is a consequence of my way of exploring science. Like a toddler in a ball pit, I grasp a body of literature and run with it for a while, never really stopping to realize the ball is an onion, with many an unpeeled layer to be discovered. As a result, most of my ‘new ideas’ are actually links drawn between branches of biology – roads between towers, not bricks in themselves. Perhaps these ideas are more easily discovered?

With the innate curiosity that comes as a given with scientists, I cannot be the first or the last with this…problem. But since I am not a country parson of the 18th Century, free to collect rocks while also fetishizing butterflies, I must find a way around it or, preferably, to harness it. Hence the vow to ‘Stay focused!’ in the recent annual meeting. The second vow to ‘Be Persistent’ is related. Its a weakness of mine that I feel disheartened when I realize a certain road has already been discovered, even in the merest sense. I have to learn to stop, map it out, pour the concrete and perhaps even build a 5-foot-1-and-a-bit sized hut on it.

Growth

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Breakfast with Nina last week. She fessed up that she and Monica had been secretly doing a course on tropical rain forest ecology. I hate PhD students doing course work: it is an excuse not to do research. Course work is easy. Defined targets, supportive professor who knows where things are going (for the most part). Research is hard. Targets you have to define for your self. Supportive professor (if you are lucky) who has no idea where things are going (if it is real research).

Nina fessed up because there is a chance they will be on NPR. But finally, I had an explanation for why the two of them have been talking so much community ecology in the last few weeks.

And I was very proud of them. They were interested, and they did it despite me.

(My wife’s comment: what else are they doing they have not told you about?)

Becky, and transferable skills

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I was in Scotland last week, staying with one of my former students, her husband and her three adorable children (6, 3, 1.5 y.o.). Becky went into banking after she finished her PhD over a decade ago. For those who do mouse malaria, Becky is the Timms of Timms et al. We got to talking, and this is what Becky wrote…

So, imagine this, you are part way through your PhD or postdoc and you are thinking about what you will do next. It might be more of the same, a move to a different research area, or a move out of academia. This is something all junior researchers face. In my particular case, towards the end of my PhD I didn’t have any firm ideas. I wasn’t sure if I was going to stay in science. Or, if leaving science would feel like a failure. Or, now I am recalling this, if I would ever finish my bloody PhD. But what I can share if you are in a similar position is that you have options. Quite exciting ones in fact. And your experiences are developing skills that are wonderfully valuable whether or not you stay in science. At the request of Andrew, I am going to share my personal story and 8 Points that I would have found helpful back then.

Some of you may have heard of me via lab group meetings, but for the others, let me introduce myself. I did a PhD with Andrew way back in 2001 in Edinburgh. Thesis title: The Evolution and Ecology of Virulence in Mixed Infections of Malaria Parasites. At the time, I obviously spent rather a lot of effort thinking about, and doing, the work that went into my thesis. Just now, I had to look up the title. Even I am slightly shocked by this – all the blood, sweat and tears, and I can’t recall the exact title?! Point 1: the work that you obsess about today may fade as it becomes less relevant, however your skills are transferable.

At the end of my PhD I became a banker. Now there’s a modern-day swear word! I made a very difficult decision to leave academia. And a (general linear model free) analysis of my skill set was a large part of this. Now, perhaps this sounds easy to you? It was awful: I am British; I am a woman; and, despite outward appearances, I was not very confident. These three conditions made it somewhat challenging to catalog my skills (am I good at X? Well not as good as they are….). Point 2: this exercise is not about saying what you are best in the world at. Just what you are good at. I found it helpful to compare my current day skills to those that I had when I was 16.

So what transferable skills do you develop in research that can help you in your career outside academia? I will assume you are mid-PhD like I was.

Straight up with Point 3: completing a PhD gives you confidence and an edge. Let’s face it, following many iterations of selection, the folks around you are fairly bright. Possibly among the brightest in society. That can ruin your confidence and make you feel stupid at times. But remember, you are part of that peer group and have been through similar rounds of selection. You many not feel it at the time but, being objective, and on reflection, you are also quite clever. There, I’ve said it. This is a wonderful, beautiful revelation and you can guard your secret if you wish, but even if you never tell anyone, you carry this knowledge in your heart. And, more importantly, consciously or otherwise, in your behaviours. This will get you noticed. I’ve met a lot of very clever people in the business world. But none of them have been cleverer than some academics I know. And when I talk to these business people, they are consistently impressed and interested in hearing that I have a PhD. This is a great conversational aid and can help you hugely with networking (I might include networking as another Point, except that I didn’t learn how to do it properly until very recently – of course, you might not take as long as me to learn this and I have some helpful tips if you are interested).

Another skill, that is easy to trivialise, is that you will be quite an expert in Microsoft office software such as PowerPoint, Word and Excel etc. Having software skills is expected, but don’t underestimate how helpful these can be – I have helped many people who have in turn helped me out with something. Point 4: being personable, eliciting favors and learning from others is the quickest way to get on top of a new job.

Point 5: giving lab group meetings, departmental seminars, and conference talks means that you are pretty damn good at giving presentations and communicating difficult ideas to an audience that can be either more expert than you, or new to the material. This is very useful at interview, and essential in your business role. Being able to clearly communicate with people is the key skill in business in my view (with networking being a close second). And the audience will never be as scary.

You already are, or at the very least are mid journey into becoming, a magnificent critical thinker (Point 6). All the literature reading, scientific debates with your mates, and those bruising challenge sessions with Andrew has sharpened your thinking. Once dissecting arguments and data sets becomes second nature, you are onto a winner that will help you cut through to the core of issues and work out the solution.

Point 7: you write beautifully, or you will by the time you have written up your PhD with Andrew.

I’m sure we all agree that science is a glorious pass time and a thrilling day job. But it can also be a curiously perverse and sadistic sort of job with endless rounds of disappointment and rejection: ideas can be complex and difficult to understand; experiments go wrong; results don’t turn out as expected; papers get rejected; grants get knocked back. It is compounded by the fact that we tend to be consumed by research and live and breathe it, which makes it feel all the more personal when it goes badly. Still, Point 8: all this adversity builds your resilience. Resilience is the new buzz word in the banking world as we grapple with rebuilding our reputation following us becoming public enemy number 1.

Finally, your key weapon is a nuance of Point 3, which was about confidence arising from overcoming something that you personally aspire to achieve – completing your PhD (or why else would you be doing this). The twist on this is that once you complete it, you have had the ringing endorsement from one of the sharpest thinkers I have come across. Someone who motivated and inspired, no inspires, me. You have the fortune to be working with the amazing Andrew Read. Treasure your time in his care, I miss him. [ok, editorial Andrew here: I did not write this, honestly]

My take home message after all this reflecting is that I was a fairly average PhD student, but I have gone on to have a rewarding and satisfying career in a completely new field. I used to find the business world a little intimidating – money and power are irresistible to many, and so you would have to be brilliant to succeed wouldn’t you? What I have learnt is that I was mistaken. If I can do this, then it is not beyond the wit of you too.

p.s. Andrew has my contact details and permission to pass them onto you if you want to follow anything up.

Performing

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“…remember that some nervousness makes for a better performance. If after some experiments you are still very nervous, an alcoholic drink before the concert can be most beneficial.” – Trevor Wye. Practice Books for the Flute, Vol. 3: Articulation.

In some ways, I think that giving a talk is one of the less stressful forms of verbal communication for me, because I don’t have to speak extemporaneously. It’s like I’ve carefully prepared a piece of music and now that it’s finished, I’m playing it in front of an audience. The luxury of time to think about what I’m going to say does wonders to ward off l’esprit d’escalier* and outside of giving a talk, it is a luxury not generally available in spoken communication.

On a visceral level, however, being the center of attention still makes me extremely nervous. This is where the analogy of a musician performing a piece becomes particularly useful to me because, between the ages of 5 and 18, I was an aspiring musician. I took weekly lessons, I practiced daily, I played in several ensembles, and I made a small but noticeable dent in the 10,000 hours you need to be really good at something (so Andrew says). All of which has lead to some great coping mechanisms, except now those skills don’t go towards standing up and playing a solo, instead they go towards standing up and talking about science.

Even if I know that I can deliver a good performance, I also accept that I can’t avoid the nervousness that precedes it. With that in mind, I make sure that I know a piece backwards and forwards before I get up in front of an audience, that way I can rely on muscle memory to carry me through until my brain starts working again. Of course there isn’t the same kind of muscle memory when giving a scientific talk, but I treat each slide as a flash card and I memorize the key points for each slide to make sure that I stay on target no matter how nervous I feel.

Although I do rely on memorization, I don’t want that to come across in my performance. When I play a piece, I want it to be technically correct but I also want it to be expressive. So, when I give a talk I aim for polished but not rehearsed. Some of this comes from practicing not just what I’m saying but how I’m saying it, and some of it comes from following the advice of my PhD advisor to STOP PRACTICING THE TALK. (Note that you should read that last bit of advice in a stern Dutch voice).

More generally, giving a good performance is about hiding all of your hard work. When I play a piece of music, the point is not to demonstrate to the audience that I have mastered a difficult piece. Likewise, some of the best advice I’ve received about giving a talk is “people don’t complain that a talk was too easy to follow.” Even if I’m presenting a complicated experiment or a difficult to interpret result, I aim to present it in such a way that the audience reaches the conclusion on my next slide before I’ve put it up.

Lastly, I know that listening to more experienced musicians will help me improve my own playing. So, when I see a good talk I pay close attention to what the person is doing, why it’s working, and how I can incorporate these aspects into my next talk.

* A French phrase that will probably be instantly familiar even if you’ve never heard it before. It translates literally to “the spirit of the staircase” and it refers to all the perfect things that you think to say after the conversation is over. I suffer from this condition constantly.

Musings: Hemingway and Evolutionary Neuroscience

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I am an “Analytical” on the common “social styles” quadrant used to assess communication styles in the workplace. I doubt this surprises anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me, and my analytic personality even invades my procrastination time. While on reddit the other day (the greatest time sink in the history of the internet), I came across two things:

1. “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” -Ernest Hemingway
2. This article.

Both of which I mulled over for a while, and then synthesized them.

1. I think Hemingway is brilliant, but he is clearly speaking from a biased stance of self-reflection, and most likely said this while drunk. However, his sentiment stuck in my mind, as I clearly surround myself with highly intelligent, yet [seemingly] happy people on a daily basis. But then I thought about figures I consider to be highly intelligent, mostly of the artistic variety, who are/were also plagued by at least one of the psychiatric symptoms mentioned in (2.) – anxiety, paranoia, obsession and compulsion. What gives; is there a correlation?

2. If you read the actual paper, you’ll see that the entirety of this study is based on the platform of the Evolutionary Threat Assessment System Theory, a portion of neuropsychology that suggests that parts of the brain (basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, a set of structures responsible for emotion and memory, primarily) have evolved to detect threats, tangible or intangible. Malfunctions or deformities in this anatomy is suggested to contribute to a spectrum of mental illnesses, but I’ll be focusing on anxiety (as overanalysis often leads down this road). But I wasn’t interested in the ETAST in the context of religion and spirituality; I was concerned with it in the context of intelligence (I know this is a subjective term, but bear with me, this isn’t my forte).

Human intelligence and our understanding of our surroundings and the world in which we live is continuing to evolve. We’re slowly moving away from performing rituals to appease an angry deity, but we aren’t seeing a reduction in generalized anxiety disorders (GAD) in adult populations. This, in some percentage of diagnoses, is surely due to overdiagnosis as well as changes in mental health evaluation. However, I posed that along with high intelligence comes a certain degree of perfectionism and dissatisfaction (perceived threats), which, in some cases may lead to anxiety (an evolved defense mechanism), and in diagnosed GAD patients, to a level of chronic anxiety that is surely maladaptive.

I did find some support for my thoughts throughout my hour of searching (and making a facebook plea to my social scientist friends to help me out). A study published last year demonstrates that in patients diagnosed with GAD, scores on the Wechsler scale of intelligence and IQ tests positively correlate with scores of a “Psychosocial Work Environment and Stress Questionnaire”. Now, to me, these data present issues as they are from a small data set (GAD n=26, healthy n=18) and the tests are obviously quite subjective. However, the study cites several findings supporting that choline levels in the brain can be correlated with neuronal processing integrity, which is positively linked to intelligence. Choline metabolite levels (obtained by specific MRI scan sequences) in GAD patients showed the same positive correlation between IQ and “worry score” as noted by the PWSQ.

Although being a chronic worrier doesn’t necessarily mean one cannot be happy, I think that perhaps both Dr. Coplan of the SUNY Medical Center and Mr. Hemingway are on to something. As someone who has a decent level of intelligence, and one who over-analyzes and frets about nearly everything, I can attest that I am one data point that would support the above hypothesis.

Hard to take puce skin tones seriously?

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The funny things with nerves is that you never know quite when they are going to hit and how badly. I can sometimes stand up in front of a room and feel confident that I know what I am talking about, and that others will be interested to listen, but other times I will be griped by a feeling of rising panic and a flush of blood which makes my face turn puce* (or in the worst cases vivid purple)**. The frustrating thing is the direction it goes does not necessarily seem to linked to the importance of the occasion. I have spoken at conferences with people I would really like to impress in the room feeling pretty unfazed and then panicked at the prospect of saying two sentences to introduce a seminar speaker. I once gave pretty much the same talk three times in two weeks, once during my interview here and then at two conferences in the week after I got back. The first time and the third time were fine, but the second time (where I wasn’t interviewing for a job and at the smaller friendlier of the two conferences) I felt like my head might explode. I also know from chatting to Nicole that I am not alone in this unpredictability of nerves but it does pose a problem on how to deal with them – apart from make-up/a mask with normal skin tone in my case.

*defined in the United States as a brownish-purple color.  In the UK, it is defined as a purple brown or a dark red. In France, where it was invented, it is described as a rather dark reddish brown.Any of these could probably apply.

** As a side note that is my reaction to nerves, others get a wobbly voice or shaking hands, I go very odd colours.

You had me at “Dear Dr. Mideo”

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I find reviewing a paper to be sort of a strange experience with an unclear payoff. On the one hand, even when I feel like I’ve been negligent in keeping up with new literature, if I’m reviewing papers then I’m still learning about the latest (and most relevant) research.

On the other hand:
1. I take way too long to review papers — the whole process probably takes 10 hours when you sum it all up, though that’s spread over a few days. I like to read the paper, think about it, read it again, write about it, sleep on it, read it again, rewrite about it, submit. That’s a lot of time away from doing my own research, and a lot of time that I realise I won’t have the luxury of spending on every single paper in the near future.

2. I often think I’ve done a bad job. Usually I have about 38 minutes of grace after submitting a review before the feeling that I wrote something completely stupid and beside the point starts to sink in. I hate this feeling. Very very occasionally I don’t think I’ve done a bad job, like that one time when Referee #2 offered only one sentence, with no punctuation, that was in absolutely no way helpful. That time my review was awesome (at least by comparison).

On balance, it’s not clear that the time and anxiety involved is worth it, especially considering that we’re all guilty of complaining — often with considerable venom — about the reviewers of our own papers. It’s a pretty thankless task. Until it isn’t. 

It’s funny how little a journal has to do to make us feel valued. You’re welcome, Proc R Soc. Any time. Glad I could help.

Can’t make a decision? Flip a coin.

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I was listening the other day to a podcast on Freakonomics that explored the link between quitting and happiness. The bottom line that I took away from the stories relayed by people who had quit something, like their jobs or a relationship, was while it is stressful, they were ultimately happier for it in the end.

Not that I want to quit my job or my husband, Greg, for the record.

However, I do think that when one begins feeling too comfortable in life it is time to shake things up. Thus, after four exciting years here at Penn State working with Matt and Andrew, it is probably time for me to move on because I am finally starting to feel comfortable with my job. The question is what to do with my life now in academics. Should I focus on getting a job teaching at a small liberal arts school or give it a go at a research-based institution? While each route would bring very different life experiences, I can see as both options making me happy. So how do I make this decision?

A thought experiment evolved from the letters and comments relating to this podcast I recently listened to the other day. This fairly simple experiment (http://www.freakonomics.com/tag/decision-making/) was created by Steve Levitt, and it is geared toward helping people make tough decisions by flipping a coin, based on a random algorithm, online. So I decided to try it out. What was done slightly in jest yesterday afternoon turned out to be a valuable moment of clarity. My coin flip indicated I should go the route of teaching at a small liberal arts school. My immediate gut reaction to that flip was dismay and “bummer.”

So in reality, I already knew the answer. It only took a flip of a coin to figure it out.  Now, time to get cracking on those publications.

Scientific Hurdles

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I tried jumping a couple of hurdles when I ran track in high school. Literally, like two, and fortunately they were set up on grass.  Let’s just say my physical coordination has never been all that awesome, and it’s a good thing I became a scientist.

Research has its own hurdles, and lately they have been mainly logistical as I have been setting up our facility for culturing Plasmodium falciparum. We’ve been keeping parasites alive since February 24th. Hurdles have included: no gas or vacuum lines hooked up to the biosafety cabinets (solution: portable vacuum pumps and portable refillable fuel containers for flame); no ultrapure water for making media (solution: carboys and the occasional trip to main campus); a brand new liquid nitrogen tank that was a true lemon, bubbling away 47 liters of liquid nitrogen in less than 48 hours (solution: we should be getting a replacement tank soon, but in the meantime we’re using some extra space in another tank to store a few samples).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retrofitting of our incubator with CO2 capacity still has a few electrical bugs to work out, and getting someone to fix these has taken a while. This would have delayed culturing, so rather than wait, we bought a candle jar. It’s a big glass desiccation container with a candle lit inside – when the candle snuffs, the gas is perfect for parasites, though the more permanent fix for the electrical mystery surrounding the sensor is in the works.

Similar to my high school experience of first trying hurdles on the softer grass, I’m lucky to have good bosses, and good support from my lab mates to make this thing work. Simon in particular has been jumping many of these hurdles with me. The first infected feed using our home-grown parasites was yesterday. The finish line of getting an infected mossie is getting closer!

Feeding mossies Plasmodium falciparum for the first time! Mosquitoes are in the cups, which are then placed in secondary containers after the feed is over.

As a side note – I learned a few things today on a tour of the new BSL3 facility that is currently under construction. Piping in gas is an issue for fire safety, and vacuum lines using BSL3 agents need special filtration systems before the air can go outside; this probably explains why these weren’t already in our biosafety cabinets.

Bilingual parrots

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Taco the African gray

Having a parrot is kind of like having a small alien equipped with a copy of Lonely Planet’s the Human Home. Parrots hatch from eggs, females are the heterogametic sex, their red blood cells have nuclei and yet, by flipping to the vocabulary section of their guide book, they still have the ability to ask where the bathroom is.

Like the aliens on movies and TV shows, the ability to communicate makes parrots unusually relatable to humans, despite our obvious physical differences. Not only do parrots communicate with us in our own language, they communicate with each other in ways that are almost impossible not to anthropomorphize.

For example, parrots have contact calls they use to keep in touch with their companions. In Costa Rica, yellow-naped Amazon parrots that roost in different geographic regions have their own dialect of calls, despite extensive gene flow between the different regions (Wright et al 2005). Parrots that roost at the intersection of regions can use both dialects interchangeably, although I’m not sure if this is equivalent to switching from “y’all” to “yous” or from “hello” to “bonjour.”

Furthermore, the contact calls of parrots are different than the calls made by most other animals because they are specific to an individual and other individuals can use the signature call to address that individual. In other words, parrots don’t just say “attention all parrots, I am Parrot,” they say “attention Specific Parrot, I am Other Specific Parrot.” Like our given names, these unique contact calls are learned by baby parrots while in the nest and they depend on the vocalization of mom and dad (Berg et al 2011).

All of this is to say that when it comes to late night laboratory companions, I do believe that the top choice is clear.

Could 100 monkeys in 100 years do a malaria experiment?

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A lot of science is monotonous. My last couple of weeks have been mainly been filled with moving liquids between tubes, shaking those tubes, spinning them, adding different liquids, freezing them and then starting again with new tubes. This monotony is something most of us are familiar with. Many of us spend days/weeks/years counting things under a microscope, counting bigger things not under a microscope, collecting dust from ledges, filling and labelling tubes or pipetting. While this sometimes makes me question why I worked so hard to get here, or whether a well-trained monkey could steal my job, there is a sense of satisfaction to the data or samples in the freezer slowly building up. The payback also comes with the excitement of the first results coming through. On Friday, after many hours of extracting DNA from mosquitoes, we got the first few results from an experiment I have been working on since Christmas (and on a failed previous attempt since September). It is amazing how quickly you forget all that boredom and frustration and start planning how you can do more of the same.

Thanks to everyone who helped out on this one especially Simon, Josh, Derek, MJ, Janet and Rahel – answers coming soon..

Getting paid to learn

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A couple of weeks ago I woke up more bright eyed than usual for a Saturday morning and, feeling rather virtuous, headed out to a public lecture on “Races, faces, and human genetic diversity”. This was a fascinating talk, which left me boring others with tidbits of information for weeks. For example, did you know that the police are starting to use visual profiles of criminals based on DNA found at a crime scenes?

However, while the talk was interesting, what really amazed me was the audience. It was grim rainy morning, yet the spacious lecture hall was full. I’m sure there were a few students hoping to improve their grades, or faculty supporting a colleague, however, the vast majority of the audience appeared to be from the general community.  This phenomenon is not unique to state college. During my PhD I ran the Edinburgh branch of café scientifique, an organisation coordinating public talks on science within informal settings, which has now spread around the world.  Guest lists to events would fill in a matter of hours, with long reserve lists of people disappointed they wouldn’t fit into our venues to hear talks and discuss diverse topics from animal behaviour to string theory. It didn’t seem to matter how many events we ran, the enthusiasm, and the requests for more, never dried up.

So what makes people want to give up their valuable spare time to learn about science? For that matter why is David Attenborough one of the best-loved celebrities in the UK (and round the world, surely?), with his series’ on natural history reliably pulling in huge TV audiences? I don’t have an answer, but my best guess is that we all have an inherent interest in trying to understand the world around us. For most scientists, and I imagine non-scientists, knowing a little bit about why the landscapes we see or the animals around us are the way they are, only adds to the enjoyment in observing them. Similarly, we spend a lot of time preoccupied with our own bodies so understanding how they work, why we get sick, or how other organisms are living within them, is intrinsically fascinating. As scientists our job is to think about the questions that interest us and try and find answers, as well as to learn as much as we can about what is already known. Which all makes me feel pretty lucky to do this for a living.

Of earrings and flowery shirts

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A tad late (which only means I am already fully integrated into the Spanish culture) and with a real cup of coffee in front of me, I will try to write a professional blog on my time with A&M.

I vividly remember my very first encounter with Andrew: we had proper coffee in a coffee place somewhere near his department in Edinburgh. His whole lab, including Silvie, would soon move to the US of A, and I was the jobless spouse who would simply tag along. I guess he wanted to see who I was and what I did. Although it was freezing cold, I was sweating the whole time… He asked me (very good) questions about my dissertation, but I often had no clue what he was talking about. For some reason (probably because I knew what a mosquito was), he offered me a job. I would work for Matt, whom I never met before…

And there I was, January 2008. Alone in a dirty and moldy office in CEL, complete with grandpa furniture and yellowish insect images on the wall. And with Matt as my boss… 😉 These were the early days. We had no incubators and it was a year before the first experiment would take off. But hey, I didn’t care: Very soon we would have a brand-spanking new insectary, an Anopheles gambiae insectary and Plasmodium falciparum up and running!

I was given all the freedom to come up with a line of research (from Andrews’s blog below, I would pick the following verbs: encourage, stand back, stimulate and cheer). For months I pooped out one figure after the other in excel, to show the bosses I was onto something. The white board proved invaluable: Matt and I had many white board sessions, shaping current ideas, and exploring future research directions (I truly miss those sessions). And one day, more than a year after my arrival in State College, the psychedelic plot was born. The rest is history 😉

The past five years have been a fantastic roller coaster ride. Some years were clearly full of loops and corkscrews, during other years we were more on the chain hill. But hey, you have to gain height, before you can get your ultimate thrill!

I learned an awful lot from our silverbacks. I did not only benefit from their scientific intellect, but often sat back to observe their way of leadership. From how they pitch ideas to why they hire the people they hire. I think they taught me invaluable lessons without even knowing they were teaching me. Off course there are always things I would do different, but thanks to them I feel ready to continue on my own now. I just hope that I won’t crash into the first window I encounter…

♥ I miss you all guys!

Ninth time’s the charm

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I recently decided, again, that I should learn to use R to graph and analyze my data. The decision was a form of, in Monica’s words, productive procrastination, as I was supposed to be putting together my presentation for lab meeting. But, wherever the motivation invaded from, the R infection finally took off and successfully established; I’m loving it! I’ve been thinking about why, this time, I decided to keep forcing through the confusion and why now (nerd alert!) I think it’s so much fun.

I first set out to learn R at the end of my first year of grad school. Overwhelmed by how very much I did not know about everything, my poor soul couldn’t take the blank stare of R’s option-less console, or its lightning rejections of my attempts to make it do what I wanted. (Or do anything except issue vague and vaguely disdainful error messages about how massively or minutely wrong I was.)

Now what?

Later, when I had more of my own data, committing the time to learning another way to look at the data seemed frivolous. After spending an afternoon making a list of odd numbers from 1 to 99 or the alphabet backwards, I would go back to SPSS, where clearly-labeled menus meant your p-value was just a few simple clicks away!

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure why I’ve moved past these hang-ups- I certainly don’t know much more about everything or have more time to spend getting to results- but I think it has to do with a new outlook. Now, I see using R like solving a series of puzzles with only a limited set of random tools. When what I thought I would see on the screen actually appears, it makes me feel MacGyver-y and oh-so-clever. Like I could survive living on a deserted island with only a jumprope and a pack of gum.

I’m sure the thrill will wear off…I’ve only JUST started trying to do statistical tests, and it’s going far less well than the graph-making…But, for now, if anyone needs me, I’ll be victory-dancing in my cubicle.

Of new beginnings

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Two weeks ago it painfully sank in that I had completely missed out on a major transition in Silvie’s life. Leaving her nurturing scientific nest in the Read Lab to take a brave dive into a new world in yet another foreign country, beginning a new episode… Luckily I got to spend an hour with her on her last day on campus and was able to share some tears but also present to her the subject of my distraction form anyone else’s life.

While Silvie and Krijn had been finishing up projects, packing and shipping belongings overseas, having last dinners and toasts with their loved ones, I was preoccupied with preparations for a new beginning myself. I had taken off work before the due date of my second child and was spending my time at home exhibiting perfect nesting behavior.

The baby had been due beginning of the month, but the due date past, and the new earthling was showing no intent whatsoever to come great this world any time soon. I was joining my three year old bouncing up and down the stairs, I raked leaves, and hiked all the way up Mount Nittany, but none of it helped. There was no choice but to give in to the thought of eventually being induced. The doctors scheduled me for Monday November 12, a day after Marcel’s birthday. At least we were going to be having a birthday party for him then. But given the early appointment I had been given for the induction on Monday, we decided to have the birthday party on Saturday night instead of Sunday, so everyone would be able to drink lots of wine, sleep in, and cure eventual hangovers.

We spent Saturday preparing a birthday dinner: my god mother made a fancy first course with smoked trout, fennel and orange, I prepared the first lamb roast of my life, and Marcel’s postdoc’s wife brought a to-die-for home made German Schwarzwälder Torte. The evening promised to be a success. After we had been for a short walk in our neighborhood park – the usual picture of us, a family with a toddler and a black cat – I felt some muscles contract in my abdomen. Somewhat excited I told the others, but hey – these practice contractions can last for days.

We started eating and the contractions continued, but I kept telling everybody to relax. They were hovering over me but I just wanted everyone to have a good time, we were having a birthday party after all! And again, these kind of contractions were possibly going to last for hours if not days before becoming the real thing. I don’t know whether they believed me, something told me they didn’t. When my contractions became more frequent I was starting to write them down. ‘Relax’, I kept saying, ‘open another bottle of wine and enjoy! I am just fine…’.

We made it through all courses, everything had been just divine, and I was stuffed to the rim when the contractions became definitely more severe, and we decided that maybe I should call the hospital to ask for advice. I was told on the phone that I should probably come in to check for labor, and so the guests had their last glasses of wine and were slowly preparing to go home.

Marcel and I left the house at 10:47pm that night, and Elina came to great the world at 11:43pm. There were mere 17 minutes between the ‘time of admission’ and ‘time of birth’. She was very much in a hurry all of a sudden and, it seemed, determined to have her own birthday after all. And what a considerate little person to have let us all first taste that birthday cake!

The curious case of ice hats

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A key indicator that someone is going to grow up to be a scientist, I think, is a propensity to look at the world and ask “What the…?!?”.

Having a live-in physicist has proven extremely useful for satisfying my (often fleeting) curiosity about lots of things, e.g., what is electricity? Why can’t something go faster than the speed of light? Or — stealing something from Katey’s curiosity — what would happen if there was no moon?

I was therefore surprised when my physicist couldn’t explain my recent curiosity, stemming from a bizarre finding in my freezer (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A picture of my actual ice cube tray and most recent batch of ice cubes. About 83% of the ice cubes in this batch were as expected (hat-less). The remainder had these astonishing little hats.

What the heck was this hat doing on my ice cube?!? I thought this wonder of science was sufficiently interesting to bring it up at lunch with my labmates. They offered a bunch of hypotheses for what could cause an ice hat. Maybe something was vibrating underneath the ice cube tray, or something was dripping from above it. Megan had the most inspired idea: could the formation of the ice hat have something to do with the purity of the water? The water in State College is notoriously hard, containing a lot of calcium. She thought that if I hadn’t filtered my water before freezing it, these impurities could provide a substrate around which the ice crystals could form. Turns out Megan was right, only in reverse.

Water with impurities does form ice around those impurities, but it also forms ice relatively slowly. Without impurities, water freezes so quickly that the water beneath the surface begins to freeze before the surface (which starts freezing first) is frozen solid. Since water expands as it freezes, the developing ice below pushes water up through the part of the surface that isn’t yet frozen. The surface of this emerging water freezes quickly too, so that as the water is pushed up and through a hole in the surface it freezes into a tube, which funnels more water upwards. This process generates what is known as an ice spike (though, I prefer the friendlier ‘ice hat’). The faster the water freezes, the taller the spike. With impurities, the water freezes slowly enough that the surface is frozen shut before a spike is made.

Apparently physicists could have answered my question, I just asked the wrong one. Two physicists published a paper in the Journal of Glaciology on this exact topic. Academia may be the only place where people get paid to satisfy their “what the…?!?” curiosities and that is pretty awesome.

Ice spikes are also pretty awesome. Make ice cubes from filtered water; impress your friends!

The end of the affair

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To do science professionally requires a decade or so of training. Most of the training is a series of apprenticeships, where practicing scientists like me attempt to provide something which will empower the PhD students and post-docs to become more like, well, me. Quite what we provide is a total mystery. Relevant verbs: cajole, encourage, shape, unleash, stand back, teach, learn, watch, stimulate, underpin, raise, console, cheer, challenge, expand, argue, backup, disagree….

The process generates a type of personal relationship unlike any I have experienced elsewhere in my life. (Nicole calls me boss, and we both love the irony.) You spend significant chunks of your life – and especially theirs – together. You live with them through the highs and the lows, the cock-ups and the dead ends, the good ideas and the blowouts, the rejections and the eventual acceptances. Particularly when you are starting a research group, your future is totally, totally entangled in their future. And you struggle, almost daily, to provide the right balance of stretch and support (mmm, sounds like an underwear commercial). For me at least, it is hard not to get emotionally invested in the apprentices – it’s hard not to really care, especially as you watch them grow. Many early-career advisers struggle to get the personal/professional balance right.

But then the apprentices fledge. For a year or two, the relationship stutters along, usually as the last papers are wrapped up, or they come to you for career advice and endless reference letters. Then the whole thing more or less stops. You mostly hear from them only when they want something (usually another reference letter). You see them at meetings occasionally, when it is always good to have a beer and talk about the old times and find out how their lives are going. For those who have become advisers themselves, it is particularly good to hear how they are doing with their own apprentices. But for the most part, your ex-apprentices are gone from your life.

That is exactly how it was with me and my adviser. He opened the world for me, gave me extraordinary opportunities and insisted (screamed, shrieked, demanded) that I take them. Never once did he accept poor performance (“what do you call this?”). He gave me as much time with him as I could take. He surrounded me with the smartest people in evolutionary biology and leaders in the then nascent field of infectious disease ecology and he insisted I talk with them, work with them, learn from them. And by totally outrageous example, he taught me that you could live life to the full in this business. Then, after 7 years in his orbit, I just left, only getting in contact when I needed a reference letter.

I always felt bad about that. But somehow, now that I am more or less the age he was when I fledged, and after 30 or so of my own apprentices have flown the nest, it feels like that is the way it should be.

Bon voyage, Silvie and Kirjn.

Leaving the nest…

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October 2004 – As a young 22 year old, I stepped into the office of Andrew in Edinburgh, Scotland. That was the start of a long and fantastic journey together. I was about to start a six-month Masters research project in his lab. Soon, my eyes were opened to the fantastic research environment of the University of Edinburgh, the quality and the enthusiasm of everybody in the lab, both PhD students and postdocs, and the stimulating research questions Andrew posed. After the 6 months were over, Andrew asked me to apply for a scholarship to do a PhD in his lab after I would finish my Masters. Two years later I would start my PhD.

November 2012 – Now 30 years old, I am once again in Andrews office, this time at Penn State and we say our goodbyes. With a lump in my throat I walk back to my office to clean up my desk. The past eight years have been really good and it is sad and frankly quite scary to leave it all behind. Much has changed, not only did I obtain my Masters and PhD, I also moved to Penn State and ‘obtained’ a husband and two children. Times change. It is time to leave my scientific dad and stand on my own feet.

Leaving Andrew is scary. How do you know you can do all this on your own? I guess time will tell. Andrew has been one of the best mentors one can wish for and has always worked hard to prepare us for this moment. He has always made me feel that he deeply cares, which I want to thank him for, a lot. The Read group and Thomas lab, past and present are a fantastic group of enthusiastic, smart and fun people. I will miss each and everyone of them, and especially my dear office mates Laura and Jessi; my tea water providers (and listening ears) Vicki and Nicole; Katey and her crazy and funny rants, all my lunch buddies and, most importantly, Megans baking. I’m sure we’ll see each other (including baked goods) again!

All, keep up the great work, can’t wait to see all the new papers coming out. Enjoy and benefit your time in this group, it will end before you know it.

Andrew, I will miss you! Thank you for all you’ve done.  Luckily leaving the nest doesn’t mean being out of touch.

The Big Gulp

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It’s a catchy phrase.

Despite the fascination of basic biology (e.g., the gorgeous mosquito below), we scientists often fail to explain what we mean without resorting to jargon. So it’s refreshing when researchers coin descriptive names rather than mysterious acronyms. It’s certainly not easy to avoid jargon when describing the life cycle of a complicated organism like malaria, which is essentially a parasitic algae that invades red blood cells and eats them up from the inside. Today I read about the “big gulp“, which is the technical term (really) for the process by which a thirsty malaria parasite takes a big drink of red blood cell. The parasite flattens like a pancake and the edges curve inward to seal around a large chunk of hemoglobin and goo (to use another technical term)–a big gulp that has been captured on film. If another group of researchers had been the first to describe this behavior, they might have named it “intracellular pinocytosis“, which would have been tragic. Nothing fails to convey enthusiasm for basic biology like dry terminology.

The Magic of Mosquitoes

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With all this discussion of weebles, success,and impact (or the lack of it!) I can’t help, but wonder about why I’m in this business anyway.  I certainly want to help people, but there is often a long and winding road from the basic research I conduct to stopping cases of malaria or dengue. The reality is that my work might not help anyone, anywhere, ever.

I have one simple goal and that is to convince the vector biology community we should study mosquitoes as we would any other animal. Just because some mosquitoes transmit pathogens that happen to infect humans does not mean they forfeit the right to be complicated or are excused from evolution outside of interactions with us or the parasites we care about.

These animals lead fantastically beautiful and complex lives outside of transmitting diseases. I believe that by lifting the blinders and looking at these insects outside of their role as vectors, that we will find new ways to control disease. We will also have the privilege of witnessing new and amazing things; moments that make nature seem like magic.

The incredibly beautiful Sabethes cyaneus. Males of this species perform dances for their ladies to convince them to mate. Stolen from (http://www.flickriver.com/photos/tags/lalat/interesting/)

I’m thoroughly enjoying working on the interaction between malaria parasites and mosquitoes, but sometimes I pine for the days when my mosquito had no pathogens and I was simply asking, “What are you doing? And why?”.

I feel like I’ve been distracted from my simple goal.  Hopefully, someday I will get back to basics. NIH probably wouldn’t fund it, but it is the magic that drew me to science and it is the magic that will allow me to endure.