If you’ve reviewed long, you’ve probably been assigned one of these. The sentences are often awkwardly phrased to the point of being distracting, and sections often read as though they were written by completely different people (often, I find that some paragraphs will be perfect, and others incomprehensible, which I think is really irresponsible on the part of co-authors who clearly wrote the well-edited sections but couldn’t be bothered to assist with the rest of the manuscript). Sometimes, the manuscripts unnecessarily aggressive language or overly confident statements with no supporting references. Often (though by no means always), these papers are written by non-native English speakers. Native English speakers (NES) can be guilty of all of the above as well, but I’d like to focus on non-native English speakers (NoNES) folks for the purposes of this post..

In many Twitter discussions, I’ve run across a mix of opinions on what to do when you have a poorly written NoNES article. Some are of the opinion that we should edit these manuscripts, as a professional courtesy– or even that it’s our job as reviewers. Others point out that we’re not copyeditors, but should focus on the science; journal guidelines usually mention something about what to do when you’re an NoNES scholar submitting a paper, like using one of a number of third-party editing services that specialize in English language editing.

Ideally, NoNES should find a colleague or friend who is a NES speaker with excellent writings skills to give a friendly review– I’ve done this, and have found it to be a nice compromise. As an article reviewer, if a paper is otherwise excellent but suffers from a need for thorough copy-editing, I may put in the work of revising. If the paper suffers from other flaws, I’ll typically make a comment to the effect of “This paper requires extensive copy-editing, as in this paragraph,” and then demonstrate with heavy edits as an example.

I’ve had ESL colleagues bemoan this practice, however, especially when examples aren’t present. “Awkward wording, rephrase” can be incredibly unhelpful without guidance as to how to rephrase. Additionally, as this TREE paper points out, publishing in the sciences is “monolithically dominated by English,” and NES speakers could be more supportive and compassionate of their NoNES colleagues, particularly given the fact that we’re in a position of privilege when it comes to language and publishing. Still, most of us aren’t trained copyeditors, and a reviewer may not necessarily be a great writer. I think that the ideal situation would be to use a professional editor of you’ve got access to the funds, or to go with a friendly reviewer.

What’s your policy when a NoNES manuscript arrives in your inbox? If you’re an NoNES , what are your thoughts or experiences about the revision process? If you’re an editor, what would you like to see from your authors and reviewers?

General Sherman, the world’s largest tree by volume, and not (sadly) an Ent. Wikimedia Commons.

The simple story of the last 2.5 million years of vegetation response to climate change could be summed up like this: temperature goes up and down, plants go back and forth. We’ve had over a dozen ice ages and interglacials since the beginning of the Quaternary Period. In response, flora and fauna are repeatedly displaced by the expanding ice sheets and changing climates. As carbon dioxide concentrations approach 400 ppm (any day now) for the first time since the mid-Pliocene, ecologists and conservation biologists turn to the paleorecord to get a sense of how well plants can track their optimal climates. Because trees are important foundational species, slower-growing, and make up a large proportion of both modern biomass and the fossil pollen record, most research on plant migration rates has focused on these charismatic megaflora.

Trees are sessile; unlike Birnam Woods in Macbeth, individual trees don’t move. When paleoecologists talk about tree migration rates, we’re referring to changes in the overall distribution of species in response to changes in climate or other drivers. You can check out animated maps of the changing distributions of trees going back to the end of the last ice age here (based on work my advisor, Jack Williams, did for his dissertation). A lot of the pioneering work on this subject was done in the 1960′s, 70′s, and 80′s by Margaret Davis and Tom Webb (my grand-advisor!), who mapped the distributions of trees from fossil pollen data following the retreat of the ice sheets. This early work showed that trees moved individualistically in response to climate change– that is, that species of trees, not communities of forests, tracked their climatic niches at their own rates and along their own trajectories. At the timescale of millennia, these range shifts were largely in equilibrium with climate, and most species seemed to have had no trouble keeping up with the warming temperatures as ice sheets retreated. The answer to the “how fast can trees migrate?” question therefore appeared to be “fast enough” — in fact, migration rates for North American trees were estimated to be from 100-1000 meters a year, which certainly seemed fast enough to keep pace with future warming. 

Problem solved, right? Wrong. As Jim Clark noted in the late 1990′s, modern observations of tree dispersal rates don’t match up with pollen-inferred migration estimates. Based on calculations of seed dispersal kernels (the shape of the curve capturing how far seeds typically disperse from a given tree), Clark and colleagues pointed out that most seeds are observed to fall too close to trees to account for the fast migration rates observed in pollen records. This so-called “Reid’s paradox” basically sums up a mismatch in what we observe in the paleorecord (rapid migration rates) and what we observe on modern landscapes (slow migration rates). There may be reasons for both to be true, such as the fact that animals (including extinct herbivores) may have played an important role as agents of dispersal, or that long-distance dispersal events, which are difficult to observe in modern settings, may be less rare than we expect.*

The extinct passenger pigeon may have played an important role in the dispersal of some plants. Wikimedia Commons.

Another explanation is that small, “cryptic” populations of trees may have been growing quite close to the ice sheets, undetected in pollen records. Jason McLachlan, a former graduate student of Clark’s, used evidence from modern population genetics in American beech and red maple to show glacial refuges may have been located much further north than the previous, pollen-based estimates. The areas of highest genetic diversity for those species today are located within 500 km of the ice sheets’ southernmost point, which McLauchlan and colleagues interpreted as being the genetic fingerprint of past refugia (as populations from across eastern North America were squashed together in a smaller area by the advancing glaciers). In other words, the starting line for migration may have been >1000 km further north than previously thought, which means that trees wouldn’t have had to migrate nearly as quickly to reach their modern distributions. According to McLachlan’s estimates, the migration rates were <100 meters per year, as much as an order of magnitude slower than previously thought.

A new study by Alejandro Ordonez and Jack Williams** looks at the biotic velocities (km/decade) of the northern and southern range limits of 30 tree species since 17,000 BP, following Scott Loarie‘s influential study on climate velocities. They found that northern (leading) edges expanded more rapidly than southern (trailing) edges, and that tree velocities were as fast or faster than the climate velocities for the same interval. They found that not only were tree range shifts  paced by climate change in general, but that biotic velocities were faster when climate change was more rapid. Populations at the leading edge were more sensitive than the trailing edge to climate change, suggesting that expansions were climate driven but mortality at the trailing edge was affected by non-climatic factors like biotic interactions. As Ordonez and Williams note, their velocity estimates (-1.7 to 2.7 km/decade) are on the low end of previous pollen-based estimates (1-10 km/decade), but slightly higher than those estimated by McLachlan et al. (<1km/decade). Meanwhile, Loarie’s climate velocity estimates for the next century are higher, ranging from 0.8 km/decade to 12.6 km/decade. To complicate matters, species have been documented to reach average velocities of 6.1 km/decade or 16.9 km/decade in response to the climate change observed in the last few decades.

Pollen abundances showing the distributions of spruce at the last glacial maximum (left) and today (right). Modified from Pollen Viewer, courtesy of Jack Williams.

Which migration rate estimates should we believe? I do think that there are opportunities to revisit the pollen record to get a better handle on this, particularly since we’ve seen major improvements in dating, increased temporal resolution of records, and lots of spatial gaps filled in. I’m not completely convinced by the molecular data, in part because work in Europe on modern population genetics have shown that areas with high genetic diversity are mixing zones where different migratory populations crossed, rather than locations of refugia. Another study suggests that some species of trees are dispersal limited and may not even be in equilibrium with climate now, but are still making their way northward more than 10,000 years after the ice disappeared from continental Europe. Pollen data–as currently interpreted– may be poorly suited to capture range shifts at short (centennial) timescales, but there also may be fresh ways of analyzing that data. Amidst all of these questions is concern is that future estimates of climate change are faster than those observed in at least the last 21,000 years, and so trees may not be able to keep up regardless of whether we follow the pollen or the genes.

Whether trees migrate quickly or slowly (both in the past and in the highly fragmented, faunally depauperate present) may affect where trees fall on the concern pendulum: is there cause for optimism, or alarm? When faced with climate change in the past, trees either migrated or went extinct. In the future, there’s a third option: managed relocation, the deliberate movement of species to help them track their habitats. The natural experiments of the past can help determine what we can expect trees to do in response to projected climate change, and whether, like in Macbeth, we’ll need to move the wood.
* As it turns out, I’m not the first person to think of Birnam Wood when it comes to tree migrations. After writing this post, I learned of a nice little piece by Keith Bennett.

**My former labmate and graduate advisor, respectively.

Academic culture isn’t always intuitive. Many undergraduates aren’t getting the mentoring they need to successfully pursue their career goals (and this is true at every career stage, really), once you’ve discovered what those might be. If you’re an undergraduate with some sense that you might need higher education to pursue your dream job– or at least decide what that is– the idea of graduate school can be intimidating. As I work through my second round of graduate applicants, I’ve found that many students are poorly prepared for the process of finding a mentor and and reaching out with that first, inquiry email. It’s unfortunate, because that is the very first step in the process; you could be shutting yourself down without even having a real chance at your dreams.

Are you not sure where to start? Are you applying to schools without ever having contacted a mentor? Do you know the difference between a resume and a CV? Are you bombarding list-servs with emails about your passion for the natural world and what a hard worker you are (pro-tip: don’t do this)? This guide is for you.

Applying to graduate school should not be a random process! Do your homework first. Image courtesy of PhDComics.

THINGS TO DO LONG BEFORE YOU WRITE AN INQUIRY EMAIL

Get field and lab experience while you’re still in college. Before you even think about applying to graduate school, you should be looking for opportunities to work in labs. It’s okay if you’re not interested in Drosophila research (as an example); working in a Drosophila lab will teach you a lot about the process of science itself, and give you a huge edge when you apply. You’ll also get a sense of what you like and dislike, and where your strengths and weaknesses are. Check your university for positions, and keep an eye on society listings for job postings for summer research assistants. The ESA Student Section has a nice collection of resources here.

Cultivate relationships with potential letter writers. As part of your graduate school application, you’ll need letters of recommendation from around three references. These should ideally be from researchers you have worked with, an advisor, and/or faculty you have taken multiple courses with. Do not ask a professor who taught the 300-student lecture you took three years ago for a letter– you’ll want these to be people who can really comment on your work ethic, ability to work independently and with others, your sense of drive and creative thinking skills, or other attributs. Ideally, letters can help bolster applications with holes, e.g, “Tom had a rough start academically but really came into his own when he discovered ecology, and I’m confident that he’s found his groove and will be a great asset to any lab.” Note: you will not generally ever see the contents of these letters, so make sure they’re from people who know you and are in a position to write good things about you.

Read papers. The best advice I got from my undergraduate advisor when it came to preparing for graduate school was to read, read, read, and read some more. I knew I wanted to do paleoecology, but didn’t have a good sense of what was out there, so I dove into the literature and came up with a dream list of researchers who were doing interesting work.

THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU’RE READY TO CONTACT POTENTIAL ADVISORS

Organize your CV. A Curriculum Vitae, or CV, is like an academic version of the resume, but it is not a resume. I repeat: A CV is not a resume. CV’s may be more than a page long, and should include everything about you that’s relevant– your educational background, work experience, publications, presentations, awards and honors, etc. I strongly recommend reading several CVs before you build your own, especially from researchers from different stages. As an undergraduate, you may not have a lot for most of the sections you see on examples, but you can also add other elements (e.g., relevant coursework) that you’d later take off as you progress. Don’t put anything on your CV that you started before college– no high school grades– and avoid part-time jobs that aren’t directly related to the work you want to do (wilderness first responder is ok, bakery cashier is not). I strongly recommend starting a CV as early as possible in your career, and adding honors, research experiences, and other achievements as they happen (trust me, you’ll forget). If you’re unclear about the difference between a CV and a resume, start here.

Write a concise, tailored, informative, and mature inquiry email. You’ve got a dream list of prospective advisors, or perhaps have come across an advertisement for a funding opportunity you’re really interested in. If you don’t, go back to the literature, talk to your undergraduate advisor, and figure out who you’d like to work with. In the sciences, at least, you are very unlikely to be accepted to a graduate program if you don’t have a faculty advisor willing to work with you.

When you’re ready to contact people, take some time to craft a brief, informative email that is individually tailored. For example*:

Dear Dr. Rosalind Darwin,

I recently read your paper, Snails are way cooler than slugs, and am very interested in your work on the importance of shells in determining awesomeness in invertebrates. I am a senior a the University of Science, where I am working with Dr. Advisor on a senior thesis about how beetles are also very cool, using tools our lab has developed linking wing shininess to coolness. I’ll be graduating this fall with a BS in Biology, and I was wondering if you have any graduate opportunities available in your lab? Until recently, my background was in plants, and I was wondering if you’ve considered testing whether the plant the snail is on affects how awesome it is? In graduate school, I’d like to apply my research to conservation, particularly in relation to climate change and other threats. My goal is to be a research professor working at the interface of conservation biology and landscape coolness, with a strong policy relevance.

I have attached a copy of my CV for your consideration, and would be very interested in discussing possibilities with your lab.

Respectfully,

Undergraduate Student

Find a comfortable setting, free of distractions, to compose your inquiry email. Don’t blow it!

Note how this letter uses the appropriate salutation (not “hey prof,” or “Hi Mrs. Darwin” or “Yo,” or “Hi Chaz.”). Seriously: I have not responded to emails that addressed me as “Mrs.” — or worse, “Mr.” Gill” (It’s Dr. Gill, Professor Gill, or, at the very least, Jacquelyn Gill. Spell the name correctly. By tailoring the inquiry, as I’ve done in my example, you show that you’re not on a fishing expedition by directly connecting your interests with the researcher’s, and shows that you’ve done your homework. The example also gives Dr. Darwin a better sense of what your interests and goals are.

Don’t lie, but don’t be your own worst enemy. Tell the truth about your research interests and goals, even if you’re not completely sure what those are. Obviously, doing some hard thinking about what those goals actually might be is an important part of this process. Some advisors won’t be interested in working with you unless your goals are to obtain a PhD and work at a major research university, and so don’t be afraid to aim high and sound confident. Having said that, don’t say you absolutely want to get a PhD to study exactly what your prospective advisor studies, and to work at a top research university if it’s not true. If you want to use graduate school as the opportunity to decide whether academia is for you, that’s okay; just be up front about that, without sounding wishy-washy. Don’t use the inquiry letter as a therapy session; minimize personal details, and emphasize the positive. Don’t trash talk your previous advisors or institutions. Don’t copy text from your prospective advisor’s website and past after the words “I would really like to research_____.” Don’t lie about whether you’re applying to other programs (remember that even if you end up not studying with a particular person, they may end up reviewing your grant applications or papers). Don’t sound too tailored, in other words, and be honest, straightforward, enthusiastic, but not pandering. Keep your language professional, but don’t be afraid to sound enthusiastic– but keep your feet on the ground (no poetry or hyperbole). If this all sounds like a tough balance to strike, that’s because it is– but remember that if you’re disingenuous or trying to hard, it will show. It’s always a good idea to show other people (including your undergraduate advisor!) a draft of your email before you send it!

Don’t treat graduate school inquiries as though you’re applying for a position in a marketing firm. Career Services centers are often very poorly equipped to advise students when it comes to applying for academic positions (see the resume versus CV discussion above). For your inquiry letter, avoid what I call “business school language.” Notice how in the example above, I didn’t include anything like “I am a highly motivated student, committed to academic excellence.” That’s what I want to see in your letters of recommendation, not in your inquiry email. In other words, show, don’t tell. Your first sell, to me, is your brain– I’m interested in whether you’d be a good fit for the lab, and demonstrate an ability to think originally and well. Your CV should tell me if you’re a high achiever, whether you’ve done a lot of fieldwork in adverse conditions, and whether you’ve published. Saying “I have experience in conceiving, executing, and bringing to fruition an original research project” is pointless if your undergraduate thesis is listed on your CV, and just serves to make you come across as stiff or grasping.

Make sure you provide everything that is asked for, in the appropriate format. It may be that you end up responding to an advertisement instead of cold-emailing a professor. If that’s the case, follow the instructions to the letter: provide a CV (not a resume, and not a resume disguised as a CV), a cover letter only if asked, and any other relevant information. Don’t attach your transcripts, GRE scores, etc. unless explicitly asked for them. This sounds like a no-brainer, but a large proportion of the emails I receive don’t follow directions.

Applying to graduate school is a stressful process, but you can save yourself a lot of time, effort, and headache if you do a little background work and make sure you send targeted, well-crafted emails to the professors you’re interested in working with. They may not respond anyway (professors are notoriously busy and are often poor email communicators), but they’ll much more likely to respond than if you take the shot-gun approach.  You may get a polite response with an apology that the researcher lacks funding, in which case it’s always a good idea to research graduate funding opportunities, both broadly (like the NSF GRFP) and at your institution of choice. Almost always nowadays, graduate school starts with the first email; it’s the modern-day foot in the door. Your prospective advisor will not only guide you through the application process and advocate for you, they’ll also be the one you spend the next two to eight years with, mentoring you in your development as to an academic adult. You’re going to be a huge investment of their time, resources, and energy, and your letter really needs to show them that you have the independence, intellectual maturity, and professionalism to succeed as a student. Don’t blow it!

Good luck!

*As John Anderson–my undergraduate advisor!– notes in comments, you should not actually use the terms “awesome” or “coolness” in your letter, as I did in my tongue-in-cheek example. In a real-life example, those should be replaced with appropriate scientific terms. I also have to credit John with a lot of the advice I’m sharing about writing a well-tailored letter. It got me into graduate school, after all.

Edited to add: Check out this great post over at Dynamic Ecology on applying to grad school.

Pollen-coated anthers on a cactus flower. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Plants have sex. While flowers, cones, and fruits– basically the vaginas and uteruses of the plant world– feature prominently in human cultures, much of the actual, er, act of plant sex is invisible to us. As northerners dig out from under record-breaking snowfalls and eye the ground for the first crocuses and robins, folks to the south are already beginning to experience a trademark of spring (and the male equivalent in the sex lives of plants): pollen season. The microscopic powder produced by seed-bearing plants are not sperm, per se, but are in fact microgametophytes, or sperm-producing cells. The word “microgametophyte” packs a handy definition for those up on their ancient Greek: “micro” means tiny, “gamete” is a combination of “husband” and “wife,” and “-phyte” refers to anything plant-related. Basically, pollen is a sperm delivery system. If a pollen grain “gets lucky,” that is, it meets the flowers or cones of its species, it germinates, creating little tubes to deliver the sperm to the ovule, which is the female gametophyte. That’s plant sex, in a nutshell.

But what about the pollen that doesn’t make it to ovules, the losers in the world of plant procreation? What happens to all the unsuccessful pollen?

To answer that, you have to start with a different question: why do plants make so much pollen in the first place? As anyone with seasonal allergies knows, pollen gets everywhere, forming a fine yellow powder that coats cars and windows, and is even visible on the surface of lakes in regions with lots of conifers (the champions of pollen productivity). You may be tempted to think that all that pollen is a big waste, but it’s actually part of a very successful evolutionary strategy. Genetic variation is a good thing (cue the theme song for Deliverance), and so plants have evolved strategies to share their genetic material with as wide a range of potential mates as possible. Tobler’s First Law of Geography states that things that are closer to you tend to be more related, and so it follows that getting your pollen to the flowers and cones of other, faraway plants is a smart strategy if genetic diversity is the goal. Plants disperse their pollen in one of three ways: wind, animals, or (for a few aquatic plants) water. Of these, wind is the best method for getting your pollen to faraway plants, as long as there are enough potential individuals to reach. This strategy is especially common for weedy species (like ragweed) and for trees in the boreal and temperate zones (the tropics tend to have many more specialized animal pollen dispersers). A large reason for this is the fact that the trees in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere are windswept in spring, and there are usually only a few, common tree species present (so an inanimate transport method is especially effective). Pollen can be transported quite long distances– in fact, Ephedra pollen from the American southwest has been found in sediment cores as far away as Ireland! Because this is a post about failed plant sex, we’re going to stick with the wind-pollinated (“anemophilous,” or wind-loving) plants, which produce those copious amounts of pollen that are so ubiquitous–and irritating for those with allergies– in the flowering season.

Pollen floating on a lake, where wind and currents have pushed it close to shore. This pollen has failed at sex, but wins at science! Image from Wikimedia Commons.

To get back to the original question, much of the pollen that doesn’t make it to other plants ends up in lakes and bogs. While people have been admiring pollen grains under a microscope since the mid-17th century, the idea that all that excess pollen might be ecologically useful didn’t take hold until a 1916 talk by Lennart von Post. von Post was a peat scientist working for the Swedish Geological Survey, and is known as the Father of Palynology (the study of pollen, from the Greek for “the study of things sprinkled around”).  He was the first person to appreciate the fact that the changing amounts of different kinds of pollen preserved in the peats could essentially be read as an archive, telling the story of vegetation around the bog. He realized that fluctuations in the pollen of various plants could be interpreted as signals that a new species had migrated into the region, flourished when its climate was optimal, or died when it was not, to be replaced by other plants more suited to the local conditions at the time (you can see the first-ever published pollen diagram here).

How does this work, exactly? For starters, lakes and bogs act as giant collectors, accumulating debris from the organisms in and around the surrounding watershed. This material (pollen, plant parts, charcoal, insect bits, and other debris) settles to the mud at the bottom of the lake or the top of the bog, where the cold, oxygen-depleted water of the former or the acidic conditions of the latter preserve the material through time. As this accumulates, it forms layers in the mud, with the deepest being the oldest. In other words, every lake and bog you see on the landcsape is an archive of environmental change through time. The bigger the lake or bog, the broader the “source area” of the pollen, and the greater the scale of the landscape history you’re able to reconstruct with pollen. In areas where the ice sheets reached their maximum extent, those archives may go back more than twenty thousand years; in the rift lakes of Africa, the records can span hundreds of thousands of years of earth’s history (though these are considerably harder to acquire).

Fortunately, pollen is incredibly resilient stuff, protected by a coating of one of the most resistent biopolymers known in nature, sporopollenin. In fact, sporopollenin is so resilient that its chemical makeup is not entirely known; it’s so effective at resisting breakdown by other chemicals that the usual techniques fail to determine its composition. Corrosive acids and bases have little effect on sporopollenin, though strong oxidizers like bleach will destroy pollen in minutes. The sporopollenin coating is handy when it comes to protecting the pollen on its long-distance journey to other plants, but it also helps preserve the pollen in the sedimentary archive. Thousands, or even millions of years after its parent plant has died, pollen-rich cores of mud and peat– like an ice core– can be extracted by paleoecologists like me. You read that right– pollen is even being extracted from shales–hard rock– from the Miocene (23 million to 5.3 million  years ago), and scientists are testing its isotopic make-up to understand the evolution of grasslands and different photosynthesis strategies in grasses.

A core segment from Silver Lake, Ohio; older, silty clay associated with cooler and drier climates on the left transitions to organic-rich mud, right. This mud will have to be dissolved with a lengthy series of chemical digestions to extract the pollen contained within.  Photo by Jacquelyn Gill.

Once the mud is taken back to the lab, sporopollenin’s resiliency shines. The trick to isolating pollen grains from everything else in your mud core– smooshy bits of leaves and other organic parts, sand, wind-blown dust, clay, etc.– is a series of chemical “digestions” designed to dissolve everything except those little microgametophytes of interest. Pollen analysts subject the samples to a careful series of treatments, designed not only to break down the unwanted material, but also to remove organic acids and other components of the mud in order to prepare it for further treatments down the chain. Strong acids and bases are added in succession, dissolving organic matter, carbonates, and sands (!), leaving a small fraction of the original cube of mud each sample starts out as. If you’ve done everything right, you’ve got mostly pollen at the end. Dab a little of it on a microscope slide, magnify it to four hundred times its actual size, and you become a paleo-detective, reconstructing the landscape scene from the pollen clues left behind by long-dead plants. In fact, palynology has become a useful tool in forensics, since it can provide valuable information about where bodies may have been at particular times (including Ötzi the Ice Man).

Pollen grains are quite distinctive under a microscope, which is a big reason for their usefulness. Not all pollen can be identified to the species level, though. For some trees, like oaks, the morphology is too variable within species, too similar to other species, or both. Under a microscope, oak pollen has the gestsalt of “oak” but an analyst can’t tell the difference between, say, a red oak and a white oak. Still, the amount of information recorded in the pollen record is remarkable, particularly when it comes to global change research. Pollen analysis has been used to reveal how plants responded to cycles of severe drought in the Great Plains, has captured the widespread deforestation immediately following the KT impact event that killed the dinosaurs, shown the persistence of the Amazon rainforest during the colder, drier climates of the last ice age, elucidated the pre-settlement vegetation on Easter Island, linked the end of the Age of Pyramids in ancient Egypt to widespread drought,  and shown how climate change and the extinction of the ice age herbivores caused the formation of completely novel communities of plants (my research).

Scanning electron microscope image of a range of pollen grains. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

When you put many of these “fossil” pollen records together, you can map out how trees have shifted their ranges and abundances in response to past climate change, which is one of the primary clues about how well species may be able to keep pace with climate change in the future. Check out these cool animations of mapped tree distributions over the last 21,000 years to get the idea. According to the rates observed in the North American pollen record, tree populations were able to spread from 100 to 1000 meters a year, which is an order of magnitude faster than predicted based on observed seed dispersal distances today. This disagreement is known as “Reid’s paradox,” and is an active area of research. The discrepancies between modern observations and the pollen record may be due to the fact that it’s difficult to observe long-distance seed dispersal in the field, and so it may be more common than we think. Or, there may have been “cryptic” populations, or “refugia,” hanging out in suitable microhabitats close to the ice sheets, acting as a sort of advance scout force ahead of the migratory front. These populations may have been so small as to essentially be invisible in pollen records at larger scales, which is why they’ve been unappreciated in the past. Another hypothesis is that paleo-seeds may have had help from birds or extinct megaherbivores, which is bad news for plants looking to hitch a ride in today’s fragmented landscape. All of these hypotheses can be tested with a combination of pollen analysis and other tools, like phylogeography (the geography of genetics) and computer modeling.

Ecologists and conservationists are increasingly turning to the lessons from pollen –from failed plant sex– for a long-term perspective on issues like conservation baselines, ecosystem resiliency, disturbance, and climate change. With apologies to those who suffer from seasonal allergies, we have a lot to thank the plants of the past for. Without a reproductive strategy that essentially relies on prodigious ejaculation, we’d know a lot less about what North American forests looked like before Europeans cut them down, or what extinct moas ate. Not bad for for a bunch of failures.

Edited to clarify some details on the evolutionary advantages of wind pollination in temperate and boreal trees, which are still somewhat oversimplified in this post. Thanks to evolutionary ecologist Tom Givnish, who taught me Advanced Plant Community Ecology back at UW Madison, for feedback!

“too many young, especially, female, applicants don’t bring much to the table that others don’t already know or that cannot be readily duplicated or that is mostly generalist-oriented.”

I’m not interested in unpacking Clara Jones’ (yes, a woman’s) statement beyond saying that “don’t bring much to the table that others don’t already know” is basically a sexist way of saying that female applicants “are on par with or even slightly exceed others,” which is rather telling in and of itself. There is abundant evidence that perception, not ability, influences gender inequality in the sciences– it’s even been tested empirically.

What I am interested in is why other people in my community don’t think those kinds of comments are harmful and aren’t willing to say something about it if they do.

When someone makes a sexist (or racist, etc.) statement on a society list-serv or a blog, how do you respond? Do you ignore it? Do you call the person out privately? Do you call them out in a response on the list-serv? After the sexist comments were made in Ecolog-L, some members did in fact call them out. This was immediately followed up with various responses that fell into two camps: 1) “Saying female graduate students are inferior isn’t sexist” (this has later morphed into “she was really just pointing out poor mentoring!”), and 2) “Calling someone out for a sexist statement on a list-serv is inappropriate.” Some have called for “tolerance” on Ecolog-L; arguably, more real estate in this discussion has gone into chastising the people who called out Jones’ comments. These people are almost universally male. I would like to ask them this question:

Why is it more wrong to call someone out for saying something sexist than it was to have said the sexist thing in the first place? 

This isn’t the first time there’s been a gender-based kerfuffle on Ecolog-L; last April, a discussion erupted when a female asked for advice about taking a baby in the field, which devolved into various rants about how women academics were selfish and bad mothers. ProfLikeSubstance has a nice overview of that discussion on his blog and, as he points out in in a post yesterday, Jones was behind many of the sexist comments then, too. Back then, I responded to some of the folks during that discussion, and was flooded with supportive emails off-list. A number of them were from young female graduate students who felt alienated and hurt, and even doubted whether or not they should stay in science– not because they doubted their abilities, but because they felt as though the climate of academic science was hostile. 

So, readers, which camp do you fall in?

1) Do you think that it’s okay for you to make off-the-cuff or even deliberate statements about women being inferior, or guilting women for not being good enough at science, parenting, or life in general? Your words are harmful. They contribute to a hostile culture that drives women out of science. We have empirical data on this. Even if being sexist was not your intent, the damage is still done.

2) Have you been called out for saying something sexist? You probably feel uncomfortable. Stop for a moment. Sit with that discomfort. Do not belittle, dismiss, or lash out at the person who called you out. Apologize. Acknowledge that you have heard the person and will think about their words and your actions. Realize that by calling you out, the person is taking a huge personal risk– women especially get bullied for making these kinds of statements all the time. Also know that being a woman, having female friends, and being married to a woman do not in any way exempt you from having said something sexist.

3) Have you seen a sexist statement and stayed silent? Remember that silence is often read as your being complicit with what was said. Even if you think the statement is beneath you, your speaking out matters, especially if you’re male. Being a good ally sometimes means standing up to sexism publicly, because the risks are much lower and the payoff greater, in part because men are perceived as having less of a stake in the argument (as opposed to being made by “yet another angry female”). It’s okay if you don’t know how to respond; sometimes a simple, “hey, that’s not cool” is all it takes to let others know you’re listening, and you’re an ally.

4) Have you told someone not to complain about a sexist statement? You are silencing them, which can be just as harmful as the original sexist statement. You’re creating a space where it’s more okay to say something sexist than it is to call it out. You’re marginalizing people, especially when you bring up concerns about censorship and not wanting people to push their “values” on others. Free speech does not entitle you to speech without consequences, and equality is a value that, last I checked, was central to the ESA’s mission.

5) Have you told someone to “just ignore the trolls” when they’re upset about sexism? Especially if you’re male, saying “just ignore it” is an act of privilege; that is, the very fact that you can ignore it means that you’re not as affected by the statements or the culture they represent. Not everyone has the luxury of walking away. When I as a woman see sexist statements, they are reminders to me that the environment I work in may be hostile to me and to people I care about. That isn’t easy to ignore, especially when we still have a leaky pipeline problem (and a society that focuses on telling women how not to be raped, rather than telling men not to rape, and etc.).

6) Have you called out sexism, publicly or privately? Thank you. Your work matters, even if you don’t end up convincing the person you called out. You’re pushing back against a broader culture of discrimination, making others feel as though they have allies, and even educating people who are watching silently from the wings.

Why are these conversations so prevalent in Ecolog-L? It’s not exactly a fringe community; the list-serv has more than 16,000 subscribers. Is it because (ironically) ecology tends to have more women than other sciences, and therefore people feel more comfortable engaging in discussions about gender? On Twitter, ecologist @Duffy_Ma rightly asked, “I mean, do other society listservs periodically debate whether women are qualified to do science?!” In the ensuing discussion on Twitter, many people have expressed the fact that the negative responses to gender discussions are why they have left or are considering leaving Ecolog-L (though I would add that no one has an obligation to remain in a space they feel is hostile to them). This makes me sad, in part because it means we’re bleeding out potential allies, leaving a space for troglodytes making sexist comments that are observed by early career folks with no real push-back (and then they see what happens when someone does take the time to respond). While I love the Earth Science Women’s Network and think safe spaces are important, I don’t think that women should all have to jump ship and find our own little clubs, because we all do science together. We review one another’s grant proposals and papers. We invite one another to symposia. We’re departmental colleagues. We’re friends.

Sexist statements like this matter. They matter because there is pervasive gender bias in science and science education. So, what’s next? I’d argue that the first step is not to filter out problematic statements with better moderating (within reason), but rather to create a culture where the anti-sexism take-down is so swift and overwhelming that it sends a clear message that sexism is wrong and not to be tolerated. If you find yourself– intentionally or not– on the receiving end of a take-down, take responsibility for your statements. All of us, regardless of gender, need to take responsibility for the culture of our academic communities. Yes; I mean you.

*I would like to state for the record that this post is not an indictment of ESA (and Ecolog-L is not officially tied to ESA). ESA has done really excellent work to broaden the diversity of the ecological community, and has to my knowledge only been supportive of gender and other diversity initiatives.

sciseekclaimtoken-4e839085ed32b

I thought, too, about the sessions about scientific outreach and blogging, where inevitably someone reminds the room that many academics aren’t supported in their outreach endeavors. A common revelation is the advisor or senior colleague who says “time on a blog is time away from the lab bench,” or “How do you have time for science?” The implications, added up, are that podcasts, collaborative student blogs, and field-based live-chats with the public well and good in theory, but they should ultimately be jettisoned in favor of doing Things That Will Help You Get Tenure. Those things are 1) publications (in peer-reviewed “traditional” journals, of course) and 2) grants. This very blog is, by the rubrics of many tenure committees, not a Thing That Will Help Me Get Tenure. It doesn’t matter that I know that my blogging, Tweeting, and other outreach efforts are greater than the sum of their parts. I’m sensitive to the challenges I face in the coming years. So, I ask for advice, and I do what I can to prepare for next year.

Funding rates versus proposal submissions for NSF-DEB for the last decade.

Recently, the National Science Foundation (the primary funding agency for my research) started moving from two-a-year to one-a-year grant cycles, in part to reduce reviewer burden. The numbers are in for last year’s Division of Environmental Biology grants– the first year with the new one-a-year cycle– and it appears that early career researchers have about a 7% success rate, which is down from the previous year. Given that investigators are now limited to two proposals each per year (for DEB), I both have lower odds and fewer opportunities for funding than someone in my position would have had even five years ago. I’ve been told that it takes about three rounds on average before a grant is funded (if at all), which puts the funding situation in an even more sobering context. 

And so, I ever since the holidays, I have been working on grants. Many folks have been surprised to hear that I’m already submitting NSF proposals, given that I’m stim a postdoc. My tenure clock may not start ticking until September, but I am keenly aware of its looming presence. If my DEB is rejected, which has a high likelihood, I won’t be able to resubmit it until January 2014. Even if that gets funded, my co-PI and I won’t see the money until January 2015, which means we can fund students to start in September 2015. Let’s give them three years to start cranking out papers, and we’re looking at 2018 at the earliest for that research to reach the broader community. 2018 is also happens to be the first year I can submit my portfolio for tenure. 

One consequence of my foray into grant writing is that I have gotten very little science done since December. Instead, I have spent most of my time and effort on projects that likely have a <10% chance of being funded. Don’t get me wrong; I’m excited about these projects, and excited about the science and students they will fund. But the last six weeks have been time away from 1) writing about the science I’ve already done, and 2) doing new science, which means fewer papers in the pipeline (one of the Things That Will Help Me Get Tenure).  I made a choice to invest in the long-term project of acquiring funding, and it may not have been the right choice. I won’t really know until I reflect back in six or seven years.

From PhDComics. The joke I’ve heard is that research grants fund you to do the work you’ve already done.

There are real barriers preventing scientists from being better teachers, doing good outreach, and effectively communicating our science to our peers and the broader public. But I can’t help but think, as I’m deeply embedded in grant-writing mode, that “time doing outreach is time away from science” is the wrong part of the activity pie to be focusing on. To me, teaching, blogging, and other forms of outreach help vitalize my research and make it relevant. Publicly funded scientists have a duty to make our research accessible to others, whether that’s as a resource to citizens via a university extension program, or bringing high school students into the lab. Outreach activities need to be recognized, incentivized, and rewarded by university tenure committees, and they rarely are.

In the meantime, though, when I hear “blogging is time away from science,” I can’t help but think “so is grant writing.” Which isn’t to say that scientists shouldn’t have to apply for funding; I’ve found grant writing to be a powerful exercise in both honing my thoughts on a topic while simultaneously broadening my knowledge base.  But being at ScienceOnline while in full-time grant-writing mode has been an eye-opening experience for me. I hear a lot of academics say that they don’t have time to blog, or talk to the press, or volunteer to be a scientist liaison in their local communities, and yet many accept the enormous burden of grant-writing as part of the status quo. The irony of this is that outreach ultimately serves many more people than failed, perpetually unfunded grant proposals.

Instead of outreach, I’d like to suggest that the real effort bottleneck for scientists is funding. NSF can restructure its funding cycles in any number of ways, but it’s still the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. This year’s new crop of faculty are facing lower funding rates and fewer opportunities than ever before; meanwhile, many labs are turning to crowd-funding efforts like SciFund and iAMscientist, (which, incidentally, rely on strong social media networks to be successful). I worry about my faculty cohort, and the choices we are faced with as we learn the juggling act of the tenure track. It’s unclear to me how tenure committees will judge my faculty cohort relative to those that came before, when funding opportunities and rates were both higher. More time grant writing means less time doing and communicating about science, which are the things I really signed up for eight years ago when I started graduate school. We lament poor teaching, a lack of public science literacy, chemophobia, climate denial, and creationism taught in public schools, and so we continue to put the pressure on scientists to be better communicators, more innovative teachers, and multimedia experts. Which is all well and good, but if we’re not also calling for increased science funding, the outreach training and media initiatives are all for naught. We have to get that funding rate above 7%, period. Otherwise, all those ideas I’ve brought home from ScienceOnline will stay in the Broader Impacts section of my next grant proposal, instead of in classrooms, living rooms, and town halls.

For some numbers on US research funding rates, check out this useful LiveScience infographic here.

ETA: If you know of a specific initiative to increase federal science funding, please let me know in the comments! Otherwise, feel free to contact your elected officials.

ETA: NSF program officer Alan Townsend has some (unofficial) insight on why this first year’s DEB numbers might be a bit low, and we shouldn’t read too much into them yet. Check out his post here. 

My fifth interviewee, Heidi K. Smith, just completed her PhD in Biological Sciences in the Hobart Lab at Columbia University (congrats!). She tweets as @HeidiKayDeidi and runs a beautiful biodiversity blog at Nature Afield.

1) What advice do you have for first-time attendees of ScienceOnline2013? 

Be open to everything. Come ready to share your ideas, but listen and let yourself be inspired.

2) As a scientist with a clear love of biodiversity, what do you see as some of the biggest barriers to conservation efforts?

I think funding is one of the biggest barriers to conservation research.

3) Your blog, Nature Afield, is subtitled “notes on biophilia,” an E. O. Wilson reference. Can you tell me a little about the concept of biophilia, and how that relates to your work as a scientist?

I believe that everyone is born with a strong connection to nature. As some people get older they forget that connection. Nature is what inspires me and drives me as a scientist. I like to bring back some of that feeling of wonder to everyone.

4) Who are your mentors? What science writers or researchers do you look up to?

Niko Tinbergen is a hero of mine. He couldn’t be anything else in life besides a biologist. I like Ed Wilson because he is phenomenal at communicating his enthusiasm and ideas. At the same time, he is a truly gifted scientist.

5) What has been your experience as a woman in science? Do you have any advice for young girls interested in careers in science?

My Mom is a nurse and a strong female role model. I grew up thinking I could be whatever I wanted. Until I started my PhD at Columbia I don’t think I realized there was a bias at all in science. I had a fantastic female lecturer who happened to be teaching a class of all girls. She reminded us that women are often judged more harshly so it is our duty to be over prepared.

Women in science run the gamut of personality types. Little girls should know that you can be a girly girl with a pink sparkly microscope or a tom boy that dissects frogs, but you should do what you love. It is curiosity and tenacity that female scientists have in common not fashion or feminist views.

6) What’s the twitter-version of your PhD research?

My PhD research was setting out to understand the genes and molecules involved in salt chemotaxis in the nematode, C. elegans

7) What’s one stereotype of scientists that you’d like to correct?

I would like people to understand the value of basic research. The public is so focused on disease-based research and I would like them to see that we know very little in some cases about elementary physiological processes.

8) What’s the coolest experience you’ve had in the field?

I wrote this project on a grossly understudied family of aquatic salamanders and contacted several scientists with relevant previous publications The herpetologists that I contacted were extremely helpful and I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support. One individual in particular, Paul Moler invited me down to Florida to go out and catch some of these salamanders. I had read several of his papers and had been working on this proposal for quite some time and all of a sudden I was wading through chest high water with this incredible biologist catching them.

My fourth interviewee, Melanie Tannenbaum, is working on her PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She tweets as @melanietbaum and blogs at Psy Society. You can learn more about her lab’s research here. Melanie gave me really excellent answers, and told me to feel free to edit them down. I couldn’t bear to, because she had such fantastic things to say! So, if this post is tl;dr, I urge you to take a question a day and come back until you’re done.

1) You’re a PhD student in psychology. Can you tell me a little about your path, and how you ended up here?

Sure! It’s not incredibly fascinating, though. I came straight through to grad school from undergrad; I always knew that I loved psychology, and as I gained research experience in college, I realized how much I love the research process in particular. Spending your workday asking really interesting questions about human nature and then figuring out the answers to them is a pretty sweet gig. I took a bit of a roundabout path getting to Social Psych in particular, though. I went through most of college as a Developmental Psychology major, I initially thought I’d pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology, and my undergrad honors thesis was in Educational Psychology, so I sort of bopped around for a bit. As for why I eventually settled on Social Psych…it’s no more complicated than the sheer fact that no matter what I studied or researched, I always found Social Psych to be the coolest, the most interesting, and the most fun to read & learn about. If you’re going to spend your whole life learning the minutiae of a field and working your bum off day in and day out to eventually contribute what will likely be a very tiny piece of new knowledge, you had better pick a field that you find REALLY, earth-shatteringly interesting. But now I can totally say that Social Psychology is hands-down the most awesome topic in the entire world. No bias or anything
2) What advice do you have for first-time attendees of ScienceOnline2013?

I can only enthusiastically repeat the best piece of advice that I myself received last year, which is that you should feel free to introduce yourself to EVERYONE. Recognize someone from a Twitter avatar or from the pages of the New York Times? Go up and say hello! I’m as “junior” in my career as it gets, so I know how easy it is to feel intimidated, especially when you see some of your Writing or Science Idols. But everyone in this community really is so supportive and welcoming, and everyone embraces the culture of Open Access, both when it comes to research and when it comes to forging connections with other attendees. Trust me on this one. You really can’t have a bad experience; it’s basically impossible.

Also, don’t feel weird having Twitter open on a screen right in front of you at all times. At dinner, during talks, as soon as you get up in the morning… you’ll get used to that happening real fast.

3) One of your research areas is in persuasion and behavior change. As a scientist who researches global environmental change, I’m very interested in how we get people to change their perceptions and actions in order to protect the world’s biota and prevent climate change. What does your research suggest are the best (and worst) ways to go about this?

I’ve actually been spending the past few years working on a meta-analysis of research on fear appeals (aka “scare tactics.”) They get used in persuasion all of the time, but there’s still a surprising amount of controversy over whether or not they work, when they work best, when they backfire, etc. Without giving too much away (since it’s still in the submission process), scaring people about environmental change should actually get them to change their behavior…but the message will work better if it includes an efficacy message (e.g. telling someone what they can do to prevent the danger from happening, and assuring them that this response works/they can successfully enact it, rather than merely scaring them). Fear also tends to work better for one-time-only behaviors, as opposed to behaviors that you have to enact over a longer period of time…so, it might not be an ideal strategy for getting someone to change their daily lifestyle, but it might work well for convincing someone to buy energy-saving lightbulbs while they’re physically at the store.

Finally, our analyses suggest that fear might actually work better in people who are not as personally invested in the topic; those who are highly involved or who derive self-esteem from the target behavior that you’re trying to change are more likely to react negatively and reject the message. So, for example, a frightening message about the perils of climate change might be particularly unsuccessful (or even dangerous) in people who hold strong political opinions or people who drive “gas-guzzlers.” For these populations, a different tactic would probably be better; some suggest more positive-framed messages rather than fear, like what could be gained by positively changing behavior. Fear might be alright, on the other hand, for people who may not hold strong opinions or may not feel particularly strongly about the negative behaviors that they engage in, but simply don’t know enough about climate change to have formed an opinion or adopted positive behaviors. With that sort of a population, fear would actually probably work pretty well.

As for other people’s research that I find cool, some of my favorite persuasion research looks at the surprising power of social norms. As it turns out, we’re incredibly susceptible to descriptive norms. Simply saying what *other people* do can exert a really strong influence on our own behavior. For example, one famous study by Cialdini (the god of persuasion research!) manipulated the signs in a forest where people had been taking too much wood, which was causing damage to the natural environment. The sign either said that the majority of people *don’t* take wood with them (trying to instill a descriptive norm saying that most people don’t do the negative thing), or that the majority of people *do* take wood with them and that this is really bad (trying to instill a more prescriptive-style norm saying that most people do the negative thing, but you really shouldn’t). Even though a lot of people who work in advertising or communications write messages like the latter, thinking that this tactic will guilt people into being one of the “good ones,” it actually backfires — no matter what people thought others did, they were more likely to act the same way, even if that meant taking the wood from the forest.

The first message was the one that worked the best; if people thought that most others did *not* take wood with them, they didn’t take it either, in an attempt to fit in with the norm. Noah Goldstein did something similar with towel reuse in hotel rooms; simply telling people that the majority of other people who stay in that room have reused their towels got significantly more people to choose to reuse theirs. Descriptive norms are incredibly powerful — if you can just get people to believe that others tend to act in positive ways when it comes to environmental behavior, you can usually get them to shift their own actions in that direction as well. Just don’t make the mistake of setting the wrong kind of descriptive norm!!

4) One of the things that I’m interested in is helping members of the public to learn what academics themselves are like. What does a typical day look like for you, both in terms of work and play?

Wake up around 7:00 AM, catch the 8:00 bus into the office. From 8:30-11 or so I’ll usually knock out a bunch of smaller tasks that still have to get done and can end up taking a surprisingly long amount of time as they add up. Stuff like…respond to e-mails from students, write/photocopy quizzes for my class, review & finalize the lecture slides for my class, post the slides on Compass, grade quizzes, organize papers, clean my desk…stuff like that. As it gets a bit later in that time block, I’ll transition into more research-y work…like reading articles (for journal club, for class, or for my own research interests), designing/programming new studies, or running some data analyses. I don’t write well in the AM, so I sort of try to do everything but that (the one exception being blog posts, which are actually easier for me to write in the AM, for whatever reason).

Depending on the day, 11-4ish is usually a lot of class or meetings, with some small 1/2-hour or 1-hour breaks in there that my friends and I will spend in the office, either squeezing work in or chatting (there are 6 of us who share 1 office, including my boyfriend and a couple of my closest friends, so there’s never a shortage of people to talk to if we really want to procrastinate or grab coffee). I teach Tuesday/Thursday, so on those days I teach 2 sections of Intro Social Psych from 12:30-3:30. I attend 3 different lab meetings, which are about 1-1.5 hours each on Wednesdays and Fridays. They can differ a lot based on whose lab it is, but generally it’s all of the “lab members” sitting around brainstorming ideas, running studies by each other, presenting results to each other, etc. We have a department colloquium on Mondays for 1.5 hours, where someone (either from UIUC or another school) comes in to give us a talk on their research every week. I also attend 2 journal clubs — one for Personality psych, one for Social psych — which is basically like a book club for academics. Everyone reads the same article (usually picked by a different group member each week), and then we sit around with coffee and snacks to critique it, praise it, argue about it, what have you. So that block of time is basically either teaching, lab meetings, or journal clubs, with any spare hours in there spent in the office working on research (or gossiping with my officemates….)

After that, I take a little mind break. I’ll head to the gym or the yoga studio for an hour or two, either to work out or teach a fitness class (I’m a newly certified group fitness instructor!), then head home to relax for a bit. But after dinner I still have to squeeze a little more work in…evenings are usually when I write best, and I actually need to adjust this schedule I’m telling you about right now because I haven’t been writing nearly enough lately. But I’ll usually grab a couple of hours of writing at night, anywhere from 1-3 hours (depending on how beat I am or how much of an uptick in energy I get after dinner/relaxing for a bit). Then, for the rest of the night after that, it’s just TV and vegging out with my boyfriend & cats (or with my friends, especially if it’s Thursday Girls Night! Or a weekend…)
5) What’s the twitter-version of your PhD research?

2 areas of interest. 1) Scare tactics: Do they work? 2) Social class: How does it affect political attitudes/behavior/perceptions of fairness?

(Oh no, I’m 2 characters too long!)
6) What’s one stereotype of academics or scientists that you’d like to correct?

Probably the stereotype that we’re all ridiculously good looking and have rockin’ social lives.
7) There has been a lot of research on the emotional health of graduate students and faculty, particularly related to depression and stress. As a psychology graduate student, I’d love to hear your thoughts on navigating the process of becoming an academic and maintaining a good work-life balance, dealing with stress, or any other thoughts you might have about making it through this process in one piece!

I actually developed a severe problem with anxiety right before my 3rd year of graduate school, when I was getting ready to take my qualifying exams. I began having trouble breathing, and very soon I felt throughout the day like I couldn’t “finish a breath” — I’d breathe in and feel like I couldn’t really fill my lungs all the way, if that makes sense. I kept seeing doctors about it, but I’m a runner and I work out every day so they were a little stumped, especially when all of my physical tests came back saying that my heart & lungs were not only normal, they were exceptionally healthy. It was a really bizarre time. It took a while to realize it was an anxiety disorder. I always knew that somatization was a very real and painful experience, but until I experienced it myself, I didn’t realize just how *frustrating* it is to KNOW that the cause of your problem is mental, to try incredibly hard to “get over it,” and still feel like there’s nothing you can do.

The quals themselves were fine (I passed with no problem), but the breathing problems stuck around for a while. I actually only recently began breathing normally again, after a lot of effort and treatment on my part — and after over a year of struggling to breathe, a particularly horrible symptom for someone whose main form of stress relief happens to be exercise. That experience informed how I think about a lot this stuff. I had to learn how to place my mental health and well-being very high on a list of priorities that is very, very long. I think that the qualifying exams sparked my anxiety issues, but I think they persisted because of many more things. Adjusting to grad school (and academia in general) is difficult because you have to learn how to cope with the feeling that there is always more you could be doing, always something that you are behind on, and always something that you’ve managed to fail at. It’s a really tough transition, especially for a population of people who have probably been told their entire lives that they’re brilliant, special snowflakes.

Every day it is a challenge for me to send a draft to my advisor that I know could be more perfectly written, to say that the “analyses are done” and the paper is ready to be finalized when there are endless more regressions that could be run or different models that could be tested. It’s an exercise in learning how to decide when you’ve done something “good enough,” and learning how to realize that you’re never going to truly feel like anything you’ve done is ever finished. I think that the hardest thing anyone learns in grad school is not how to write, not how to do research, and not how to conduct analyses; it’s how to be okay with the constant knowledge that you could have done more, and how to know when to say that you’ve done enough, so your work doesn’t sit unfinished on the table for 5 years waiting for that day when you’ll eventually feel like there’s nothing left that it needs.

So, it’s hard. But imposing boundaries can help. Sometimes I’ll say to myself, “I will only spend 1 hour editing this introduction. After that, it’s done.” It’s really simple, but it really does help. And like I said earlier, in my free(ish) time I blog and I teach group fitness classes. Even when I’m not teaching group fitness, I work out every day for 1-2 hours. Would I get more done if I spent every second that I now spend blogging or exercising doing research instead? Sure — that’s how time works. But would I *actually* be more productive if I didn’t have exercise in my life as my stress release, if I didn’t have a healthy body or the quality of sleep that I get at night from working out regularly, if I didn’t have something to take my mind off of work for an hour so that I can have an uptick in energy to write a little more later that night? Would I be able to write as well and as quickly as I do if I didn’t have so much practice writing about research for a general audience on my blog? I’m not so sure.

Long story short, it can be really difficult. But people have to have that balance. The people I know who dropped out of grad school, it didn’t happen because they were going out every night partying and spending too little time focused on research. It happened because they didn’t have friends that they felt particularly close with, they didn’t feel like they belonged in their communities, their lives felt too one-dimensional, and they didn’t have a strong social support system. Yes, if you were to take every second that someone spends on anything not related to research and imagine that they spent those seconds working, you can imagine someone getting a lot more done. But that doesn’t do anyone any good if that person is driven to drop out of academia entirely.

My third interviewee, Jessica Morrison, is wrapping up her PhD in Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, while ramping up a career in science journalism. A woman of many talents, she shares her passions at ihearttheroad.com and recently started blogging for Figure One. She heads to the Charlotte Observer as a Kaiser Health intern in June. You can also follow Jessica on Twitter (@ihearttheroad).

1) You started off as a geology student, but are ending up pursuing a career in science communication. How did this happen? Can you tell me a little about the path you took?

I actually started off as a journalism student! I had very little interest in science as a child and into adolescence. I took all the advanced math and science classes in high school, but I filled my schedule with as many extra literature, history, writing and art classes as possible. It was only in my second semester of college that I discovered geology for the first time and decided to switch majors. Why? Why would I make such a drastic switch? Well, it was simple. I was in college, and I wasn’t thinking about ever getting a job, and the geologists went on field trips. <shrugs> Seemed like a good idea at the time, and I still love to travel more than anything.

2) What advice do you have for first-time attendees of ScienceOnline2013?

If you have time, figure out who you want to talk to now. Take a few hours, read their stuff and reach out on Twitter. I didn’t do any of these things the first time, but I should have.

3) There have been several scientist-versus-science communicator debates in the last couple of years (to grossly oversimplify the two categories). As someone who straddles both worlds, what do you think is a promising way forward for improving science communication and outreach?

Wow. This is tough, and I hardly feel qualified to offer a way forward, but communication is obviously key. As a scientist moving into journalism, I haven’t had any less-than-desirable interactions with the scientists that I’ve interviewed. I’ve mostly found them to be very open to the process, and I haven’t been in a situation where someone asked for an article in advance. In most cases, I don’t announce that I’m a scientist, too. I did, however, once jump in to save an organic chemist who was trying to explain chirality — thought maybe I should let her know I’m a crystallographer.

4) What is the most important skill you picked up as a scientist that will help you as a science communicator? Vice-versa?

Becoming a scientist has meant learning what it means to be in academia. As a first generation student, I think that having the experience of working in science directly has really given me a chance to see what it’s like on the other side. I’m not intimidated by scientists. I’m not afraid to call or email to request an interview or ask questions if I don’t understand something. Being a journalism student and then a scientist and now a journalist has changed the way that I ask questions. I never, EVER worry about sounding stupid. I do my homework diligently before interviews, but I also try to keep the conversation loose enough to get the good stuff.

5) Who are your #scicomm mentors? What writers do you look up to?

Steve Silberman was the first science writer I followed on Twitter. He was the first person from Twitter who I met offline, and he was the first person that I said out-loud to that I might want to be a science writer. Bora gave me a chance to write for the Guest Blog [at Scientific American] and talked to me on the phone when I had a scicomm idea that I never followed through with and promoted my work at every turn. I haven’t had a chance to be mentored by Deborah Blum, but I absolutely love everything about her — especially the creepy parts. Maggie KB is the best thing ever. She let me follow her around like a puppy at my first AAAS meeting. She introduced me to all her BAMFing friends and shared a room and tons of advice with me at NASW. If she’ll have me, I’d call her my mentor. John Timmer sat me down at AAAS and taught me how to plan my attack. He’s also been a great source of advice when I’ve asked for it. Deborah Shelton at the Chicago Tribune made my fellowship experience extraordinary. She had lunch with me almost every day, shared her sources, shared her stories, shared her city and helped me on my way to my next newspaper gig. David Dobbs is a fantastic writer, and he makes me want to be a for-reals journalist more than anyone else. Speaking of for-reals journalists, Michael Hawthorne is pretty cool, too. Although I didn’t get to spend as much time getting to know him at the Trib as I would have liked, I will never forget how loud he cursed while I was on the phone with sources or the time we had our lunch interrupted by an enterprising brewery friend. David Biello, Christopher Mims, Alex Witze…

I am nothing without the people who’ve given me a chance.

6) What’s the twitter-version of your dissertation research?

Actinides are the radioactive elements on the bottom row of the periodic table. I grow radioactive crystals & study their atomic properties.

7) What’s one stereotype of scientists or science communicators (or both) that you’d like to see eradicated?

Scientists can’t communicate. Science communicators can’t do science. I can do both, bishes. And I’m not alone.

8) Would you rather time travel to the past, or the future? When? Why?

The future. I want to go to Mars. I never had any interest in going to the Moon, but Mars blows my mind. I want to go there. [Blogger's note: Having just finished Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, I want to go to Mars, also. Make it so, NASA.]

My second interviewee, Anthony Salvagno, is a PhD student in biophysics at the University of New Mexico. Anthony tweets as @thescienceofant and maintains an open notebook of his research here. Have questions about open science or unzipping DNA with optical tweezers? You can email Anthony at anthony[at]iheartanthony[.]com. You can also read about the adventures of his tiny TRex friend on his blog, or follow @therealtinytrex on Twitter or on Facebook.

Anthony Salvagno keeps an open notebook of his biophysics research. Check it out!

1) You’re working on a PhD in biophysics. Can you tell me a little about your path, and how you ended up here? Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Originally I went to undergrad (SUNY Albany) for pre-law and majored in physics. At the time I was highly interested in astronomy. After my sophmore year I decided I didn’t want to do law anymore and received an REU internship at the Arecibo Observatory (in Puerto Rico) to do radio astronomy. I hated it! Luckily my senior year I took a neurology and a genetics course and became interested in Biophysics. I graduated with a BS in physics and also a BS in mathematics and got accepted to attend UNM for my graduate program.

It was here that I met my current adviser Dr. Steve Koch. He gave a fascinating presentation on unzipping DNA with optical tweezers, which is essentially a high power laser focused by a microscope objective. I decided I wanted to work in his group. Shortly after that he introduced the lab to open science, and I got caught up in it all, discovered open notebook science and have been pursuing that ever since. I’m scheduled to graduate this semester and will be defending my dissertation toward the end of March.

I hope to continue my work with open notebook science as I progress in my career, no matter what that entails. I’m going to apply to some of the museums here in Albuquerque to gain some experience in science outreach and I hope to continue some of my (less expensive) experiments and continue to contribute my results openly.

In 10 years, I hope open science will have gained even more traction. And I hope to be a major influence in that. I would love to work with the NSF to develop policy that would require open data for publicly funded research.

2) What advice do you have for first-time attendees of ScienceOnline2013?

Last year was my first year at ScienceOnline and I didn’t know anyone. Actually that’s not true, I knew a handful of people only via their twitter handles. But I made an effort to talk to everybody I could. I sat next to someone new every bus ride and chatted them up.

If this is your first year at SciO, then I suggest you do the same. Everyone is super friendly and we all have the commonality in that we are all interested in communicating science. So everyone loves to talk about what they do and loves to hear about what you do. In fact, come find me and I’ll chat your ear off!

Also join as many sessions as you can, and share your thoughts. The sessions are for discussion, not for listening, and what you have to say is as important as anyone else, so feel free to speak your mind!

And if you are even slightly artistic I suggest you go to Perrin Ireland’s session Wednesday about sketchnoting, Science Scribe. She’ll teach you some cool techniques for taking notes via images and you can go to every session and doodle the conversation. I did it last year and had a blast and I’m going to participate this year as well!

3) As a scientist with a clear love of open science, what do you see as some of the biggest barriers to making science more accessible and open? Do you have a suggestion for how we can get around that?

The biggest barrier is fear. Many scientists who aren’t open thinks open science is great (especially younger scientists), but they won’t take the plunge. The biggest fear is from scrutiny, and another major fear is being scooped. To combat this I’ve embraced being fully open in an attempt to show that there is nothing to be afraid of. I’ve also tried to educate myself and have shared my knowledge with the world via my notebook.

Another major barrier is close minded scientists. Surprisingly there are some of us that are completely opposed to open science. I’ve met a few and have worked with a few more. I don’t know exactly why they are opposed, but I try not to let it discourage me. When dealing with this kind of person, I tend to share my thoughts and continue on my own path.

Ultimately, the answer to the opposition of open science is through education. If scientists can be educated about open science, then more would be likely to pursue it. I’ve given a few seminars on the topic and the response is overwhelming, especially from other graduate students and undergrads.

I hope to receive funding for an IGERT program (grant is pending and openly accessible) that focuses on teaching graduate students about avenues of open science and provides them with funding as an incentive to be open.

4) Your blog, IheartAnthony’s Research, doubles as an open notebook. How has that worked for you? Do you have advice for scientists considering “going open?”

Overall my path into open science has been amazing. I’ve met far more people who support me than those opposed. My willingness to share and collaborate has been a huge benefit to my career. I’m always meeting new people, and most of which I wouldn’t have met if I had a different mindset (closed science). Some are interested in knowledge, others are interested in collaborating, and I’m always willing to help in any regard.

If you are interested in being open I have a whole slew of posts about maintaining an open notebook and what tools are available for doing so. Also if you are concerned about being scooped, I wrote a really lengthy article about copyright protection for science which may be useful.

5) What is the most exciting new innovation or future direction in open science?

I’m deeply fascinated by the approach of citizen science. I’m always looking for ways to merge citizen science with the smaller scale of open notebook science. The idea of having any person work with a scientist on an individual experiment is very exciting and I think can be the final bridge between the public and research.

I’ve also been tinkering with the idea of merging business with open science practices. I think the public would be less opposed to big business if they followed some sort of open model.

6) What developing science story are you following with interest?

Not to be too obvious, but I’m following the open science story intently. I love hearing about open science success stories (and failure stories). I want to know what works and what doesn’t. I also want to know where support is needed so I can try to lend a hand.

In my own research, I’ve uncovered an old story that was never finished. Between 1930 and 1970 heavy water studies were all the rage, but for some reason the research in that field almost stopped completely. I’ve been reading literature that parallel my research and trying to answer questions that have been left unanswered for almost 80 years!

I’ve also rediscovered my inner child and have been reading up on dinosaurs. When I was in grade school it was only just hypothesized that dinosaurs may have had feathers, and I find it extremely fascinating that our entire world is being flipped upside down. Latest research shows that many dinosaurs did have feathers, including the fearful T-rex. Imagine seeing a massive, carnivorous, and terrifying creature like that covered in beautiful plumage!

7) Who are your mentors? What science writers or researchers do you look up to?

My mentor currently is my academic advisor, Dr. Steve Koch. He embraced full openness after experiencing extreme closed science for his graduate appointment. He introduced me to full openness and I’ve embraced it, and everything I’ve accomplished is because of him.

I also look up to Michael Nielsen, Jean Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, and Bill Hooker for their pursuit of open science and support of me in doing the same. I look up to Bora Zivkovic for his work in scientific communication. I also look up to Jai Ranganathan and Jarrett Byrnes for their work with the #SciFund Challenge and starting a nonprofit scientific endeavor. I hope to one day follow in their footsteps to pursue a similar endeavor (the Open Lab!).

8) You’ve got a plug for #SciFund on your blog. Is crowd-funding the way of the future? What’s your experience with crowd-funding been like? Any tips?

I hope crowdfunding is the way of the future. In my experience, it works well when asking for small sums of money (<$1000). When requesting more, you need to have a really strong network and you really need to promote your research. Promotion becomes a full-time job almost.

I would love to start a research lab that is solely crowdfunded. This would allow the world to actively engage with and participate in the lab and hopefully bring science more into the public eye. I think the public should be able to determine what research gets funded, and crowdfunding is essentially that mechanism.

I participated in the #SciFund Challenge for Round 2 (May 2012) and had a wonderful experience. The network of support that Jai and Jarrett created is amazing. As a way of giving back, I worked with the Round 3 participants and offered support to anyone who needed it. I hope to continue to support #SciFund and if there are some out there thinking of joining, then do it! The process is relatively simple but time consuming. It’s a lot of fun though.

9) One of the things that I’m interested in is helping members of the public to learn what academics themselves are like. What does a typical day look like for you, both in terms of work and play?

My day varies tremendously from week to week because of the diversity of my experiments, but this upcoming week I’ll be growing some new Arabidopsis seeds in varying amounts of heavy water. I love gardening and will be starting my garden plants soon, and my Arabidopsis studies give me the opportunity to play with plants in the lab. I’ll also be conducting some yeast growth experiments. I’ve been working to adapt yeast to heavy water and will be determining how fruitful that endeavor was.

I will also be making a new batch of DNA that I can unzip with our optical tweezers. It’s a multistep process that begins with a PCR reaction to make copies of a template strand of DNA. This DNA is important because it allows us to attach our DNA to our slides and also has a molecule on the other end that can stick to 1.0um polystyrene beads. And of course I’ll be documenting all this in my open notebook as I do it.

The final piece of my work week is to continue to write my dissertation, which is also openly accessible. This week I’ll be amending my section on open notebook science and adding pieces to the chapter about my D2O studies.

When I get home I work out, mostly body weight resistance type exercises (push ups, pull ups, etc). On Tuesday I have an indoor soccer game to participate in. I’m itching to get back on the field because we lost pretty miserably last week (10-0!).

I also help a friend of mine maintain his blog. His name is T-rex and he writes about the struggles of living in a human world as a dinosaur. It doesn’t help that he is about 18 inches tall too, so he has to cope with being a tiny dinosaur. Tonight the two of us will be checking out “The Battle of the Food Trucks,” and we’ll be enjoying a basketball game as we both are huge NY Knicks fans. Tonight they play the Brooklyn Nets (grrrr….).

On the weekends I spend a lot of time working on various graphic design projects (site in development). I’m currently (sparingly) working on a story-time style book for adults with a friend. I also do very basic website construction and am currently working on a website for my brother. He’s a chef and through him I’ve developed a love for food. I hope to open a food truck so I also spend some time learning about the food industry and am developing a business plan for the truck.

Holy smokes, I’ve got a lot to do!!! I better get on it!

10) What’s the twitter-version of your PhD research?

I do #ons and publish ALL my research in real-time. I study how heavy water affects organisms and I can unzip DNA with optical tweezers.

11) What’s one stereotype of scientists that you’d like to correct?

This isn’t really a stereotype about scientists, but I’d love to make all science readable by the general public. Every person I’ve ever met has some inherent interest in science. They would be even more interested if it was communicated in a way that most people could understand. Scientists typically do a terrible job communicating their research, and it makes me sad. Wikipedia isn’t even all that good in communicating basic science.

I’d love to change the perception that science is too difficult to understand, you have to be a genius to work in science, and that science is for nerds. Unfortunately most scientists are trained to be poor communicators and that needs to change. Like most things, education is the way to change these perceptions and scientists have an obligation to work on their communication. Ultimately scientific grants would be better received if scientists expressed their ideas properly.

12) Some study systems, like yeast and Arabidopsis, are so heavily studied– and for good reason– that they’re basically biological institutions. Do you ever find yourself wishing you could play with something else? Or do your organisms still surprise and delight, after all this time?

Honestly, my exposure to model organisms has been limited, so working with all the organisms I do is still deeply fascinating. I’ve spent a lot of time just staring at my Arabidopsis plants in their test tubes and yeast under the microscope.

Last year I went on a hike and collected some moss and lichen specimens in the hopes of finding tardigrades. While I didn’t find what I was looking for, I discovered a whole new world (cue singing) and spent hours just watching all the microscopic interactions. There are some videos somewhere showing what I saw, and I’m in the process of backing them up and publishing them (via Youtube or BenchFly).