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Unless you are one of those rare breeds that do organization naturally, setting a system in place to archive your experiments takes practice and perseverance. It’s hard to imagine when you are doing an experiment for the 100th time that you will ever forget how to do it; but a year down the line, when…
I have been working and managing flow cytometry core facilities in Cambridge for 10 years and I would like to share with you some of my experiences. I have worked up the career ladder in the past 10 years and in 2012 I became the Head of Flow Cytometry at Babraham Institute. This means that…
Struggling with your PhD advisor relationship? Sometimes its repairable and sometimes it’s better to switch. Discover how to identify when it’s time to switch advisors and steps you can take to ensure a smooth successful change to keep your research and academic goals stay on track.
How often have you looked at slides down the microscope and your thoughts have been miles away? Have you ever been sitting at the bench pipetting and preparing a PCR and wondered if you had really added your forward primer to all your samples (I’ll put my hand up to this one!)? Or spent time…
On the surface, it would seem easy enough to pick an enzyme (or an amount of enzyme) for an experiment. Just look at the concentration on the label, adjust accordingly, and you’re on your way. Alas, not with enzymes. The number of units used to measure enzymes is dizzying. However, it’s better now than it…
Obtaining external funding for your project through an NIH grant is a coup at any career stage. However, obtaining one of these grants is much easier said than done. Here is some advice from someone who has been through it and lived to tell the tale.
In my first article on this topic we delved into what miRNAs are, how they are generated, and their function. Now, we are going to discuss how to identify miRNAs and their targets. Why Do You Want to Look at Something So Small Anyhow? miRNAs play a crucial role in most physiological processes. It’s not…
Lab work, as we are all aware, comes with many pressures: one of which is productivity. You want to generate as much quality data as possible to meet publication deadlines or perhaps the elusive thesis. Sometimes it may feel like hours spent in the lab don’t match the amount of data produced: for some this…
A recent article published in Nature, The future of the postdoc, painted a very bleak picture of how there is a “growing number of post-docs and few places in academia”, a concern that I am very much familiar with. As an Early Career Research Scientist, nearing the end of my first post-doc, I am faced…
This article mentions of suicidal thoughts. If you are having thoughts of self-harm, I encourage finding someone to talk to. It can be a family member, friend, or professional counselor. Many countries also have suicide hotlines. Mental Health is often not a priority for institutions or individuals in academia. Making institutions friendlier will take time,…
The more experienced hands in your lab know that molecular biology is rarely just a journey from A to B. As a result, I’ve constructed this short workflow as an introduction to genomic molecular techniques.
To draw a convincing conclusion from your data, you cannot simply shoot for the standard significance cutoff. You also need to consider the statistical power, which is determined in part by the sample size in your experiment.
After ten years of postdoctoral research there is one important piece of advice I would give to anyone embarking on a research career: Spend as much time managing your data as you do generating it Take time at the beginning of each project to organize how you will record what you are doing day-to-day. The…
A cover letter is a letter written to accompany a job application, a grant application, project reports, manuscripts, etc. that explains the purpose of your writing and incorporates certain key points of your application. It plays a decisive role in accomplishing the task it’s been written for, which is why it is so important to…
Do you fear failure every time you do an experiment?Do you feel constantly stressed about obtaining poor results?Do you feel personally culpable when an experiment goes wrong?If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you may be suffering from perfectionism. For a scientist, this is a particularly damaging trait that needs to…
One of the most exciting things about being a scientist is doing experiments that have never been done before. Unfortunately, this can also be one of the most daunting aspects of science. Read on to make taking on your next experiment less daunting.
Given enough time, even the worst rookie research disasters seem amusing. It’s a comedy of errors that test our wit and our patience, but ultimately leave a lifelong impression on how to try experimentation a little bit differently the second time around. With that said, here are 5 brief stories of amusing things I’ve witnessed…
Whether as a summer intern, exchange student, MSc, PhD or post-doctoral student, working abroad can be one of the many perks of working within the sciences. Although these experiences will often require substantial planning in advance, there are funding opportunities and many receptive destinations around the globe. During my undergraduate degree, graduate studies hadn’t been…
Although bench work is an integral part of becoming a successful scientist, it is by no means the only part of it. It is often the uncredited skill set possessed by many seasoned scientists that make them so valuable to employers and to further research. In this article I will highlight the less obvious skills…
As a graduate student or PhD scientist you are likely to be surrounded by plenty of career advice and options – that is, if you’re interested in a career in academic research or the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Those of us who aren’t sold on either of those fields are left wondering what other career…
The prospect of walking into the lab for the first time to do some ‘real’ research is hugely exciting. Ambitious thoughts fill your mind about what a brilliant research scientist you are about to become, making that all-important difference and saving the world. That is, until you step over the threshold and The Fear overcomes…
If you look closely, there’s a scenario that plays out frequently in labs across the world: A scientist sits hunched over dry ice searching exhaustedly through frozen boxes for one sample that has disappeared into the abyss. The tube or specimen in question was likely catalogued at some point in time. But, between then and…
I still remember the first time I stood in front of a crowd of about 35 people, including my brand new lab mates and professors, in my first ever lab meeting. My feet were as wobbly as ever, and all I wanted was a big boulder to hide behind, so my crazy, shaky legs would…
During my second year in graduate school, I (silently) started freaking about life post-PhD. I read voraciously about science writing, scientific editing and business consulting positions. I went to seminars offered by the career center at my school. But, I was still lost. Between all the pipetting and PCRs, I could not figure out what…
Last time we brushed up on cell referencing and constructing formulae to use Excel for some basic and some slightly more advanced calculations. This time we’re going to move on to using some built-in Excel functions and go through how to apply all that we’ve done so far to a worked example that is relevant…
Microsoft Excel can be a really powerful, useful tool for certain kinds of data processing and record keeping, and the chances are you probably don’t even know how to use half of the functions it comes with! That’s OK, personally, I find Excel a bit less user-friendly than Word, but also it’s a programme I…
You’re applying for your first tenure-track position, and you’ve heard that your dream department uses something called the h-index to decide who will get interviews. It’s an increasingly common scenario: institutions are now regularly using the h-index to help make hiring and promotion decisions, especially when they have to screen many applicants. For that reason,…
When I first started out in the lab, I used to follow all protocols to the letter. Now, this is fine as long as your reactions run smoothly. However, there came the day when I had a new protocol and I just couldn’t get it to work. My supervisor told me to just “play around”…
An ad about a Technical Officer position is usually nebulous. For example: “The post holder work as part of a technical team and provide both routine and specialist services in support of undergraduate, postgraduate, outreach and revenue-earning activities.” What Does a Technical Officer Do? In fact, a technical officer role can be summarized in two…
Ever wonder why your data isn’t the same after repeating an experiment? Well part of science’s beauty lies in the difficulty of achieving reproducibility. Heraclitus first said that no mans steps in the same river twice and the same can be applied to experiments. It is literally impossible to control for everything because the second…
For many, myself included, the idea of attending a large conference and talking to hundreds of new people can be terrifying. Often times there are people in attendance you may want to collaborate with, or that you see as possible future employers, and you really don’t want to make a bad first impression. Luckily, there…
PIPE PCR is a ligase-independent, restriction enzyme-free cloning strategy like SLIC (link to my SLIC article), SLiCE and CPEC. The PIPE method eliminates sequence constraints and reduces cloning and site mutagenesis to a single PCR step followed by product treatment. It is fast, cost-effective and highly efficient. The key step is designing the primers; one…
You’ve got an advisor, you’re done with classes, you’ve finally passed your qualifying exams and your dissertation project is underway. Life is looking good, but it’s not too early to start thinking about how to tackle your dissertation. Chances are this is the biggest writing project you have ever undertaken, so breaking it up into…
If there is a job in the world that requires one of the highest levels of motivation, I would say it is doing a PhD. Pushing yourself out of bed daily to enter the lab ain’t an easy task, especially when your results are dodgy or you have unluckily found that your lab-mates or project…
“You think you know, but you don’t know and you never will, okay?” was the response an irate Jim Mora, head coach of the New Orleans Saints, gave to an unwitting journalist questioning his management – his point being that unless you’ve actually been in a professional sports team, you will never know what it’s…
The NIH grant that you are working on only gives you five pages to describe your research strategy. You’re wrestling with a research report for Science that has a maximum word limit of 2500. And the abstract for the conference you’d like to speak at this spring only allows you 300 words to summarize the…
Detergents are all around us in the lab – and that’s a good thing! Thanks to their chemical structure, detergents can solubilize and interact with many types of molecules, making them vital to research. To show you why detergents are such a good thing for scientists, we’ll go through six examples in molecular biology where…
Whether you are writing your thesis, a manuscript or a grant, there will come a time when you need to write, but getting words onto the paper will be like trying to get DNA from a rock – you are pretty sure it ain’t going to happen. Luckily there are a few tricks you can…
I previously wrote an article for BsB detailing my experience transitioning from lab-bench research into research administration roles after a particularly unhappy experience as a postdoc. About a year into my second research admin role some restructuring occurred and I decided to try to move back into the lab. I am now working again as…
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