Monthly Archives: September 2014

Online education: The biggest hurdle for online learning

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Contributor Charles Choi

Over the last few weeks we’ve been exploring the pros and cons of online education, which is important if you are considering taking an online course. And even though there has been an increase in the number of people taking online courses, Monica Mogilewsky says online and distance science learning still has a stigma attached. “The University of London Distance Learning Programme has changed its name to the University of London International Programme, and I do think a large part of this is a feeling within academia that online and distance learning is less rigorous than a traditional classroom setting,” Mogilewsky says. “When I say I have my masters degree, on my CV it says I was part of the University of London Distance Learning Programme, but I don’t especially emphasise that I got my degree online.”

Mogilewsky emphasises the great value of distance and online science learning. “I think it’s a powerful thing – I really appreciate how online courses make learning available for more people, helping support democracy of education,” she says.

And while pursuing a doctorate has left her little time to take any more online courses, “I would consider it in the future, for specific training such as non-profit management or social media – I think it could be fun and helpful,” Mogilewsky says. “I would also consider teaching online, and I think I’d be better at it than someone who’s never taken an online course.”

Ask the expert on Naturejobs: Meet Jim Gould

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We’re launching a new series on the Naturejobs blog called Ask the expert, where you, our readers, get to chose what questions our experts answer. However, we’ve decided to ease them in slowly and will be providing the questions for you to vote on. Over time, we will open this up and ask you to provide us with questions.

James Gould

{credit}Image courtesy of James Gould{/credit}

Meet our first expert, Dr Jim Gould, the Director in the Office for Postdoctoral Fellows at Harvard Medical School.

What is your scientific background?

I have a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Louisville where I studied Akt-mediated TGF-beta secretion in diabetic nephropathy. Then I went to the National Cancer Institute of the NIH where I did two postdoc fellowships, the first examining the hedgehog/Gli pathway in carcinogenesis and the second determining the metabolic regulation of the proline redox cycle.

Why did you decide to leave academia?

I never left, I just left the bench. My decision was based on on three things: a) I was terribly interested in doing what I currently do; b) I was very good at it and had developed a reputation; c) I didn’t see a future in research for me and I felt I could do more good by helping others do their research better.

Reality v perception

{credit}Image courtesy James Gould{/credit}

What do you currently do?

I am currently the director of the HMS/HSDM Office for Postdoctoral Fellows where I oversee the professional development of nearly 1000 postdocs. I deliver career-focused programming, I counsel postdocs on their job search and networking adventures and I help develop and implement reasonable postdoc policies.

Why did you decide to take on the role you have now?

I never expected to be running a postdoc office straight out of my postdoc. The opportunity was perfectly timed and I jumped at at the chance to do what I dreamed about doing at a great institution like Harvard Medical School. Unlike my progression through academic research, this was a strategic and well thought out move.

How do you want to help scientists in their careers?

I want to help them by lowering the hurdles to success so they can focus on the endpoint. I want to help them by flattening the learning curve so they can move faster and further along their trajectory. Finally, I want to help them by advising them to approach their career with the same enthusiasm, rigor, and thoughtfulness in which they approach their science.

Tell us something interesting about yourself.

People are always surprised to find out how very competitive I really am in all things, especially sports. They meet me under such innocuous circumstances, at the office, at my daughter’s school, on the T and are so surprised by my demeanor when they see me playing basketball or watching football.

Our first few options focus on career skills and exploration. Please vote in the poll below and let us know which question you would like Dr Gould to answer.


Ask the expert: October 2014. What would you like an answer to?

NB: Julie and Jim are not related!

Lindau: HIV in Hiding

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At this summer’s 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 37 laureates spent a week with 600 young scientists from almost 80 countries to share their ideas, experiences and knowledge. Discussions revolved around global health, the latest findings in cancer and Aids research, challenges in immunology, and future approaches to medical research. All of the lectures can be viewed on Lindau’s Mediatheque website.

Reporter Lorna Stewart was there for Nature Video to capture the unique spirit of the Meeting. In a series of four films, she asks both laureates and young researchers some of the most profound questions in medicine. The first film, HIV in hiding, highlights the research of Françoise Barré-Sinoussi who was awarded the Nobel prize for the discovery of HIV.

HIV in hiding
In 2008, Timothy Ray Brown became the first person to be cured of HIV — or so many claim. Brown is known as ‘the Berlin patient’ and six years on, the virus has still not been detected in his blood. In this Nature Video, Lorna wants to know the implications of his remarkable treatment. But her dreams of an imminent cure quickly fade as Nobel laureate Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who discovered HIV, brings Lorna back to Earth with a bump.

Nature Outlook also produced a supplement based on the Lindau meetings.

 

Lindau: A picture of health

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Nature Video presents four films from the 2014 Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau.

Reporter Lorna Stewart travels to the German island of Lindau to meet 600 of science’s brightest young minds and 37 rock stars – Nobel laureates.

In a series of four films, Stewart asks some of the most profound questions in medicine. In one film, superstar statistician Hans Rosling helps Stewart get to grips with the realities of an ageing global population. In other films, Stewart delves into the past 40 years of cancer research, wonders if we’ll ever eliminate side effects when we take medication, and receives a reality check on the battle against HIV.

Get a taste in this trailer.

You can view all the Nature Lindau films here and Nature Outlook also produced a supplement based on the Lindau meetings.

Naturejobs Career Expo London: Thank you

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What do you get when you mix ice cream, a jobs board and a treasure hunt? Many very happy delegates at the Naturejobs Career Expo!

NJCE14-treasure-hunt

From all the Naturejobs team, a big thank you to everyone who attended the Naturejobs Career Expo in London last Friday. We hope you all managed to get a lot out of the day from the conversations you had with exhibitors and fellow Expo goers, the conference, the CV checking service and everything else that was on offer on the day. For some tips on how to follow up on any conversations you had, take a look at our post on what to do after the career fair.

NJCE14-networking

I’d also like to extend a special thank you to all the fantastic speakers who took part in the conference. Each panel had something different to offer: from a career in the biomedical science industry to CV skills, from the discussions on the breadth of academic opportunities to the challenges (and good parts!) of working in industry, and more. There were plenty of career insights which I hope gave you something to think about when you went home.

NJCE14-Keynote

Special thanks also go to our event sponsors, FAPESP and Contact Singapore.

If you didn’t make it on the day, or were unable to catch a talk, stay tuned to the blog – we’ll be posting reports from the conference sessions and workshops. You can also have a look through the comments and conversations on Twitter with the hashtag #NJCE14.

If you were able to make it, we would appreciate your feedback and input. After all, we put this event on for you and we want to make it as useful to you as possible. We would love to hear your feedback from the event, whether it’s what you thought of the conference sessions and speakers, the CV checking service, the treasure hunt, the exhibitors, or anything else. Please leave your feedback in the comments section below or send us a message via email: naturejobseditor@nature.com or on Twitter or Facebook.

Fact of the day: the sounds of waves lapping onto the beach are relaxing because they occur at the same frequency as our breathing rate when we sleep. Thanks, Dr Thomas Weller!

Online education: The rise of virtual labs

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Contributor Charles Choi

One weakness of Monica Mogilewsky’s online science education was a lack of hands-on experience. “A class that didn’t work well was on environmental impact assessment, which was about how to monitor the industrial and agricultural human impact on different ecosystems,” Mogilewsky says. “Learning from home, I didn’t have access to a lab, so how things worked all became very abstract. So those kind of classes fell flat, and I don’t feel I got as much as I would in a traditional classroom setting.”

Online programmes are increasingly trying to compensate for this weakness with hands-on experience. “In one of our courses, we ship the materials to students for them to build circuit boards, and they upload video of them building them,” Chip Paucek, CEO of educational technology company 2U in New York says. “In another example, students who want a masters of science in midwifery from Georgetown University don’t deliver virtual babies – we arrange placements in their local areas.”

Lori Grant is currently at Georgetown University School of Nursing & Health Studies studying to be a midwife via their online course. She has been able to work with under-served populations across Arizona. “This is not uncommon for clinical rotations in health fields, but what is uncommon is to reunite weekly with my cohort of students and to learn from them at their clinical sites that vary from birth centers in California and Washington to labor wards in Pennsylvania and Florida,” says Grant. “I am able to hear how the Midwest manages a certain condition and compare that to my current practice.  What better way to share knowledge.” Continue reading →

Science blogging

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The challenges of science blogging for established professors and young PhD students.

Naturejobs-podcastUpdate 18/9/2014: This article originally incorrectly stated that Professor Jon Butterworth is a theoretical physicist. In fact, he is an experimental physicist. The text has now been corrected.

Whether you’re a PhD student or an established professor, being able to communicate your research is an important part of your career development. You will, at some point, have to persuade that funding body to give you some money, or that supervisory committee to grant you that PhD. Other times, you might have to work with politicians and the media to help them access your research. All these conversations, whether oral or in writing, require good communication skills.

Many of these will be done in a written format and blogging can be a great way to practice those writing skills.

Suzi Gage is writing up her PhD thesis. Three years ago, this was a gargantuan challenge that she was unsure of how to tackle. To prepare, she started blogging. “I really feel like the blogging has helped so much. When I sit down at a blank page, I know that I can write 1000 words. They might not be good words, but I know that I can turn them into something better.” Now she’s a well-established, award-winning science blogger, writing about epidemiology on Sifting the evidence, hosted by the Guardian.

Professor Jon Butterworth is an established experimental physicist, splitting his time between the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and teaching at UCL. He blogs at Life and physics, also hosted by the Guardian. “We wanted to share the excitement of the thing [LHC].”

Continue reading →

It’s not you, it’s me: Learning from a grant rejection

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Lisa Michelle Restelli

{credit}Image courtesy of Lisa Michelle Restelli{/credit}

Introducing Lisa Michelle Restelli, one of the winners of the London Naturejobs Career Expo journalism competition

Lisa Michelle Restelli completed a masters degree in medical, molecular and cellular biotechnologies at San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy, and she is now a second-year PhD candidate at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Her work focuses on mitochondrial morphology and its relationship to the central nervous system, both in health and in disease. Outside the lab, she enjoys cooking, reading, and travelling, preferably in combination.

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“Acceptance rates for grants in Switzerland are 30-40%,” proclaimed my prospective boss  in February 2012 as I interviewed for a PhD position in neurobiology across the Alps. “We should get your project funded in no time.” As it turns out, it was actually 51% at the time for the Swiss National Science Foundation. These optimistic figures certainly had a lot to do with my final decision to move to Switzerland to pursue a PhD, closely followed by chocolate. Even as an undergrad, I could perceive the steady uncertainty of the worldwide funding situation, so I was eager to position myself in what seemed to be a safe haven.

Continue reading →

Online education: Recognize how you learn

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Contributor Charles Choi

The online MBA program CEO of Sustainable Ethanol Technologies Julie Goodliffe took is supported by 2U, an educational technology company in Landover, MD, and from her point of view, one of its strengths was its support of a wide variety of learning styles.

“I learn best listening and recording for myself,” Goodliffe says. The videos the instructors recorded were ideal for her. “I could watch and listen to University of North Carolina professors teach whilst writing my own notes, pausing the video to collect my thoughts and record them better than possible in any in-person lecture, and digest the material.”

The synchronous sessions, where instructors and students interacted online in real-time, “were great, but were likely for a different type of learner than me,” Goodliffe says. “They allowed for human interaction and close-up student-teacher relationships, and also forced us to do the work. These sessions were necessary for learners who need instant feedback, in-person challenging, and questions answered.”

In addition, the extensive homework and casework of the programme was great for readers and book-learners, Goodliffe says, “and also reinforced the concepts for someone like me who might ignore such book work if not forced to do it. Those three aspects of every course in the programme – asynchronous videos, synchronous in-person sessions, and extensive book and case homework – seemed to encompass all educational needs.”

“An online programme that teaches solely through emails and text chats has no chance of educating someone like me,” Goodliffe added. “I need challenging material to watch and listen to. I need excellent professors to quickly move through material, illustrating concepts as they would in a lecture, demanding my attention and respect through obvious experience in the subject matter and in teaching it. MBA@UNC does that very well, and also addresses the needs of other types of learners.”

PhD as a training of the mind

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Annalise Smith

{credit}Image courtesy of Annalise Smith{/credit}

Introducing Annalise Smith, one of the winners of the London Naturejobs Career Expo journalism competition

Annalise Smith is a PhD candidate in microbiology and immunology at the University of Miami. She is funded by a predoctoral fellowship from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and works on understanding the anti-cancer mechanisms of the natural plant derived compound Withaferin A in HER-2/neu breast cancer. Outside the lab, she enjoys the theatre, spending time with family and friends, reading and travelling. She is passionate about inspiring underprivileged students to dream bigger and aspire higher. 

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Like most incoming PhD students, I entered my studies in 2009 with a blind optimism for a successful career as an academic research scientist. I fanaticised about running my own lab and pursuing my own ideas with the noble goal of improving human health and ridding the world of disease. Convinced that there were only two career options post-graduation: academia or pharmaceutical industry research, the majority of my peers and I chose academia and pursued our lab rotations and graduate training opportunities with vigour. However, our hopes for success in our chosen career gradually diminished and our post graduation options seemed not as clear-cut as we first thought.

During my time as a PhD student, my peers and I looked on as assistant and senior professors were forced to cut staff due to decreased funding. We watched our PhD mentors submit grant application after grant application, only to be a few points shy of the funding cut-off every single time. We could feel their panic as they worried about sustaining their careers in science. The rumour mill was roaring with stories of which PhD mentors were considering a move to industry and very soon we graduate students were worried too. The simple solution was that we would all just go to industry, but we soon realised that getting a position in the pharmaceutical industry immediately after completing the PhD degree was not quite as easy. Continue reading →