On the plus side, my 8yo baked them a s'mores cake (chocolate layer cake with graham cracker crumbles and marshmallow-flavored frosting), because she feels this is the most celebratory type of cake. And I invited them to a srs "post-thesis exit interview" and their friends to a surprise cake party.

I have two (amazing) seniors defending their honors theses today. I know they are going to be wonderful, but nobody talks about how to quell the incredible secondhand anxiety you feel as an advisor watching them present.

When you get a splinter at home, and you remove it under the dissecting scope in the lab, do you use your PFA-free forceps or just your regular ones? Asking for a friend.

Honestly a huge problem that science just keeps happening

A blurred screenshot of a fragment of a Microsoft Word document with extensive tracked changes. Of about 100 words, 40 are original and 60 are new.

May everyone be blessed to have a collaboration where one of you can get the words from their brain to the paper and one of you can shape existing words into something wonderful.

Linden Tree Books (@lindentree.bsky.social) in Los Altos! It's a wonderful place that I miss very much after leaving the bay.

Aww, I would have loved to have them! It’s a fun place — I feel so lucky.

Finals week, chaos muppet professor version:
1. Forgot I had a student coming to take the exam early, had only finished writing 75% of it when they showed up
2. Printed 15 exams for my 20-person genetics class
3. Trying to rectify #2, I printed the exams for my physiology class and handed them out

Have you ever read Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful? Not AI, but Gatsby characters constructed from... well, spoilers, but not constructed from, like, flesh and bone.

So many real zingers in that book. "If she could only wear clothes that were both perfectly attractive and perfectly modest, she could both enjoy the attention that being a woman in the department got her while also commanding respect as a scholar." oof

I don't feel that I'm often given the opportunity to reflect on the ways I've improved at the parts of this career I find the toughest. It was odd for me today to compare the sheer time and effort involved in that 2010 R01 vs. today's R15.

Writing the NIH research strategy section:
4th yr PhD student (R01): 4 weeks, working together with another PhD student; all day, every day
3rd yr asst prof (R15): 4 weeks; while teaching 3 classes (1 new prep), service work, research + supervising 8 students in lab

I have spent time this summer overhauling my reading system (previous system: throwing PDFs into a black hole titled “Papers to Read”). It’s working! Except that every paper I read leads me to download 3 more.

We are also hiring a tenure-track computational chemist/biochemist with a separate job listing: apply.interfolio.com/170206

We're hiring a tenure-track biochemist at Bates this year! I'm on the search committee and am happy to field ?s about the department or STEM faculty life at a SLAC. Come teach enthusiastic undergrads and do research as part of our fantastic community! apply.interfolio.com/170205 #chemsky #chemjobs

Submitting some rec letters for the SfN Trainee Professional Development Award travel grants. How you know SfN has been to this dealing-with-academics rodeo before: "Recommendation letters over one page will void the entire application."

I got really into spices (which has completely changed my cooking and eating habits) because I read The Devil and the Dark Water, a murder mystery that takes place on a Dutch ship coming back from Batavia in 1634.

We would sure love to have our IDeA NOA for the year here in Maine! Maybe we could look into getting funding out the door for existing meritorious science, even!

Dear random Mainers who stop me in Whole Foods to chat about my college hoodie: I have a particular set of skills, acquired over a long career (growing up Midwestern, being a cheerleader). You will call Susan Collins and yell about university funding by the time I’m done with you. Not sorry.

Screenshot: "I’d first like to thank the Bates College Neuroscience Department for the incredible opportunity to conduct a lab-based empirical thesis in just one semester. I loved having a project I could call my own — one that was still part of a larger group of amazing people researching the regeneration of retinal neurons. In just a few months, I experienced the full range of emotions you can feel in science: feeling overwhelmed with unfamiliar concepts, frustrated by intricate techniques (the cryostat), and totally lost trying to figure out how to turn the confocal microscope on — but also, over time, becoming a mini-expert on my topic, gaining surprising dexterity in the most expensive micro-deli slicer I’ll ever lay my lands on, and capturing images beautiful enough to make it all with it."

In the midst of end-of-semester stress, senior thesis mentoring, (badly) balancing research and teaching, and *waves hands at surroundings*, I am grateful to be given the opportunity to see the work through the eyes of my students.

I did probably about the same -- 20 minutes in each of my two courses. They were extremely engaged (and also horrified that funding rates are so low).

This was my first science job -- NIAAA, summer of 2003, studying the genetics of alcohol use disorder. An incredible and formative experience for me, and one I'd hoped some of my students would be able to have this summer.

A calendar event for 6-7pm on Wednesday, January 22: "Cook the chicken, eat it later"

Taking my bits of joy where I can: when the thesis students accidentally put their personal events on the shared lab calendar

Needed to propose a new neuroscience course for the fall (when I'm teaching a 3-load so I can take pre-tenure leave in the winter). Stroke of genius: realized I could repurpose a bunch of my Human Physiology material from when I was a biology adjunct simply by proposing a course on the hypothalamus.

In fact it is the profoundest wonder we can still imagine and accept, and at the same time so unusual that we have to force ourselves to wonder about the wondrousness of this wonder.” -Miroslav Holub

Hooked my neural development students on day 1 with my favorite development quote: "Between the fifth and tenth days [in the mouse] the lump of stem cells differentiates into the overall building plan of the embryo and its organs. It is a bit like a lump of iron turning into the space shuttle...

Me, starting my reappointment dossier teaching statement: how can they possibly expect me to write five whole pages about my teaching philosophy
Me, six pages in: how can they possibly expect me to write only five pages about my teaching philosophy

Does a lunch of a cookie and cereal from the dining hall count as eating food?

SLAC life: last day of class today, got to science briefly in the lab, submitted a conference abstract with a student, inhaled cafeteria dinner, sang first soprano in the choir’s fall concert

Reasons I became a professor:
1. So I could blast Christmas music in my own lab the day before Thanksgiving