You've invited a prospective postdoc to interview with you, and you want to take her to lunch. You can, as some investigators do, pull out your own credit card and consider it a good investment in your future. Or you can ask your department head to pay for the lunch from departmental funds. But how much better it would be to have a lab fund that you can dip into for this and other reasonable expe...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX When I first started my career in ecology at the end of 1990, I could not have imagined the variety of work I would be involved with over the next 10 years or so. I finished my degree in geography at Kingston in 1989 and had decided some time before that I wanted to pursue a career in the environmental field. I had always had an interest in biological sciences but also i...
The original reason for publication--to communicate results--has become secondary to a scientist's professional advancement. Scientists need authorship on papers to survive. Recent years have seen many misleading--and some downright dishonest--authorship decisions, and some of them have gotten a lot of attention. There is a movement afoot to reestablish the accountability of authors. Most authors...
Challenge is the core and mainspring of all human activity. If there's an ocean, we cross it; if there's a disease, we cure it; if there's a wrong, we right it; if there's a record, we break it; and, finally, if there's a mountain, we climb it. --Climbing historian James Ramsey Ullman Scientists are coming to terms with the fact that running a lab really is running a business. Yet, in looking for...
It really is like running a business. By the time you have run a successful lab for 4 or 5 years, with one or two NIH grants, a multitude of administrative responsibilities, and a payroll of students, technicians, and postdocs to meet, you won't need to be convinced that a little management expertise is a valuable thing to have. Most PIs would agree in hindsight that paying more attention to orga...
