This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge. I am working on organizing an Inclusive Ecology Section within the Ecological Society of America. This section will provide resources and support for all ecologists, regardless of race, sex, physical or mental ability or difference, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socio-economic status, culture or subculture, national origin,  parental status, politics,

I recently gave a talk at a retreat for new PIs working at QMUL. My talk was focussed on tips for getting started, i.e. the nitty gritty of running an efficient lab. It was a mix of things I’ve been told, worked out for myself or that I’d learned the hard way. PIs are expected to be able to do lots of things that can be full-time jobs in themselves.

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge Most people aren’t familiar with the challenges of working on a PhD with a disability or chronic illness, and yet there’s a good chance that someone you know is in this situation and isn’t talking about it. This is the first in a series of posts about my experiences completing a PhD with a chronic illness, and about the things that we can do to support our colleagues and students so that they can

This is a long post about Journal Impact Factors. Thanks to Stephen Curry for encouraging me to post this.

I saw this great tweet (fairly) recently: I thought this was such a great explanation of when to submit your paper. It reminded me of a diagram that I sketched out when talking to a student in my lab about a paper we were writing. I was trying to explain why we don’t exaggerate our findings. And conversely why we don’t undersell our results either. I replotted it below:

A few months ago Mick Watson wrote an awesome post about How to recruit a good bioinformatician. We’re in the process of hiring a scientific software engineer so I thought I’d use Mick’s post to illustrate why you should come work with us doing scientific software development and data-intensive research, and hopefully provide a concrete demonstration of the sort of things Mick suggests for appealing to talented computational folks.

My research group is hiring a Scientific Software Engineer to help develop software that facilitates science, contribute to research in data-intensive ecology, and improve scientific research and computing through training and modeling competitions. We are actively involved in data-intensive computational research, open source software development, and open approaches to science.

We were asked to write a Preview piece for Developmental Cell. Two interesting papers which deal with the insertion of amphipathic helices in membranes to influence membrane curvature during endocytosis were scheduled for publication and the journal wanted some “front matter” to promote them. Our Preview is paywalled – sorry about that – but I can briefly tell you why these two papers are worth a read.

Writing in the latest issue of Lab Times, Alex Reis portraits two sections of ‘do-it-yourself’ in the biosciences. One is the group of ‘citizen scientists’, some of which are organized in DIYbio.

When I finished my PhD 15 years ago, the neurosciences defined the main function of brains in terms of processing input to compute output: “brain function is ultimately best understood in terms of input/output transformations and how they are produced” wrote Mike Mauk in 2000 (DOI: 10.1038/76606). Since then, a lot of things have been discovered that make this stimulus-response concept untenable and potentially based largely on laboratory