Skills and Advice

Preparing graduate students and postdocs for diverse careers Changes in the workforce are challenging academia to prepare scientists to be adaptable and adept at communicating across boundaries. To meet these demands, the Plant Science Research Network (PSRN, plantae.org/PSRN) is shifting the focus…

Earlier this year I gave a Plantae seminar on "Images for Impact" - simple, free tips about how to source and create images to use in your science writing and communicating. Here is the text of the handout I created to accompany the seminar. You can get this as a PDF here. You can download the…

Another excellent entry in PLOS Computational Biology's "Ten Simple Rules" series. Read "Ten simple rules for writing a response to reviewers" here. Short version: Rule 1: Provide an overview, then quote the full set of reviews Rule 2: Be polite and respectful of all reviewers Rule 3: Accept…

Words of Wisdom from Those Who Publish (and Do Not Perish) By Helen Sword A PhD student approached me after a writing workshop to recount his tale of woe. “I write these messy, incoherent first drafts,” he lamented. “They’re absolutely awful! Then I have to work on them for hours and hours…

Looking back on his 40-year career gives author Stephen Campana the opportunity to distill very useful career advice. Very briefly, here are his 12 steps, but we recommend you real all of this interesting and useful article, found here, from the ICES Journal of Marine Science. Read, read, read …

Rebecca Mosher is an Associate Professor in the School of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona who studies small RNAs and epigenetics. You can reach her at @rm0sher . Have you ever felt like you don’t belong in academic science? Do you think that you aren’t as smart as the people across…

A 2011 editorial from the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC). Any jackass can trash a manuscript, but it takes good scholarship to create one (how MBoC promotes civil and constructive peer review) http://www.molbiolcell.org/content/22/5/525.long Key points: Review a manuscript only…

Published on Apr 28, 2016 How do you juggle a toddler in a research lab? Very carefully. This talk looks at issues facing women (or any caregiver) in scientific careers, along with examples from women who have found ways to be successful as parents and as scientists. As a member of the Biology…