In-person science meetings are returning. To the introverts and the carers, the time-poor and the cash-strapped, the climate-conscious and the travel-phobic, the visa-challenged and the real-coffee appreciators, we had our chance; but in-person science meetings are returning. It’s a sad fact that during the pandemic, we failed to make virtual events work as a complete replacement for in-person meetings.
There are perennial topics of discussion on Science Twitter. An example of this is: should figures be at the end of a manuscript are interspersed in the text. These topics tend not to be resolved because there are strong arguments (and personal preferences) on each side. I am not sure whether it is even possible to get people to agree with you using reasoned argument on Twitter.
The coronavirus crisis has meant that scientific meetings and seminars have moved online. This change has led to me wondering: why don’t scientists give talks the way that musicians do gigs? The idea is: after posting a preprint or publishing a paper, a scientist advertises that they will livestream a seminar to explain the work. Attendance is free.
So quantixed occasionally gets correspondence from other researchers asking for advice. A recent email came from someone who had been “scooped”. What should they do? Before we get into this topic we have to define what we mean by being scooped. In the most straightforward sense being scooped means that an article appeared online before you managed to get your article online.
Lab meetings: love them or loathe them, they’re an important part of lab-life. There’s many different formats and ways to do a lab meeting. Sometimes it feels like we’ve tried them all! I’m going to describe our current format and then discuss some other things to try. Our current lab meeting format is: Weekly. For one hour (Wednesdays at 9am) One person each week talks about their progress. It rotates around.
Outreach means trying to engage the public with what we are doing in our research group. For me, this mainly means talking to non-specialists about our work and showing them around the lab. These non-specialists are typically interested members of the public and mainly supporters of the charity that funds work in my lab (Cancer Research UK). The most recent batch of activities have prompted this post on doing outreach.
Ten years ago today I became a PI. Well, that’s not quite true. On that day, I took up my appointment as a Lecturer at University of Liverpool, but technically I was not a PI. I had no lab space (it was under construction), I had no people, and I also had no money for research. I arrived for work.
The future of cell biology, even for small labs, is quantitative and computational. What does this mean and what should it look like? My group is not there yet, but in this post I’ll describe where we are heading. The graphic below shows my current view of the ideal workflow for my lab. The graphic is pretty self-explanatory, but to walk you through: A lab member sets up a microscopy experiment.
Today I saw a tweet from Manuel Théry (an Associate Ed at Mol Biol Cell ). Which said that he heard that the Editor-in-Chief of MBoC, David Drubin shops for interesting preprints on bioRxiv to encourage the authors to submit to MBoC.
