Why do so many promising solutions — in education, medicine, criminal justice, etc. — fail to scale up into great policy? And can a new breed of “implementation scientists” crack the code?
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Welcome back to Researcher Radio. In this episode, we will explore the reading habits of academics. Learn more about how academics discover new research, how much time they dedicate to paper discovery and how they use social media in their research processes.
This podcast is brought to you by Researcher, the free app that makes it easy for academics and scientists to stay on top of new research in their area. Download it for free on iOS, Android or find us on your browser at www.researcher-app.com.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from RESEARCHER, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Ten weeks is not a long time. It feels even shorter when you’re tossed into the deep-end of a top-tier research lab.
If you’re spending your summer as a Research Assistant between semesters, or you’ve graduated and want to get some summer experience before grad school, we have ideas to help you hit the ground running.
This week, we respond to a listener question. Talia wrote:
This summer I had an AMAZING opportunity to do research at my dream school. I am a public health undergraduate and I have experience mostly in qualitative methods and community-based research. This summer I’ll be in a really cool epigenetics lab. I have very little background in biology and even less bench lab experience.For all of you bench lab folks and people in a mentoring capacity, what makes an undergraduate research assistant “coachable”? What habits do you love/don’t love in your RAs?
Great question, and we’re sure Talia is not alone in feeling unprepared for her first foray in the lab. Classes and textbooks are worlds away from the hands-on experience of research.
That’s why we crowd-sourced the traits other scientists want to see in summer research students. If you follow these guidelines, you can expect to make lifelong friends and have a solid letter of recommendation by the end of the summer
7 Habits for Summer Research
Show Humility
If you’re interested in a research career, you’ve probably done well in your classes and often been the smartest person in the room. That’s great for your self-confidence, but it’s going to drive your lab-mates and mentors crazy.
When you start as an undergraduate student research assistant, recognize that no one expects you to be an expert.
They expect you to be teachable.
That means asking questions when you are unsure about the material or getting help on the experiment where things are unclear.
And even if you have some prior experience, no one wants to hear you say “That’s not how we did it in my old lab…” Take a breath and be ready to learn a new way of doing things. Maybe the ‘old way’ was better, but you’ll never know until you try the new way!
Pay Attention to Detail
Research is all about the details, and your ability to focus and follow directions precisely will help you succeed.
Have your mentor observe and offer tips on improving your technique – things like pipetting accuracy or clearly labeling samples will make or break an experiment.
And in the first few weeks, we recommend keeping your headphones in your pocket and out of your ears. Get a few successful trials under your belt before you add other distractions while you work.
Engage with the Science
Having a summer student means an ‘extra set of hands’ in the lab, and that’s valuable, but you should strive to be more than a gel-running robot.
To get the most out of your summer research experience, do what you can to actually understand the work you’re doing.
That means asking about how your experiments fit in with the broader goals of the lab. Maybe you’re working toward a figure in a paper – take the time to see the forest for the trees.
It also means trying to understand the techniques and reagents you’re using. How does this enzyme work? Why are we adding this buffer?
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The final episode of the Citizen Science series zooms out a little bit and looks at citizen science as a whole. This episode features:
Ainhoa Moya a software engineer (formerly of Conde Naste now Disney), on the value of opening up the lab to people with deep computational skills that may not have formal academic training
Dave Guston Professor School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University on how non scientists can have input into setting the research agenda.
Caren Cooper Research Associate Professor in Ecology, and Author of Citizen Science: How Ordinary People are Changing the Face of Discovery.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Science: Disrupt, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Welcome back to Researcher Radio. In this season we will delve into the world of academic publishing and publisher relationships with authors. In this episode, we will discuss the following themes that follow the author journey. This includes the pre-submission and journal selection process, submission and peer review process, and post-publication marketing and aftercare. If you have any questions or if you would like to participate in an up and coming webinar, feel free to send an email to [email protected].
This podcast is brought to you by Researcher, the free app that makes it easy for academics and scientists to stay on top of new research in their area. Download it for free on iOS, Android or find us on your browser at www.researcher-app.com.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from RESEARCHER, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
On Monday this week, Mark was at a Royal Society conference on changing research culture, where he was awarded a prize for changing research culture with colleagues Rich Young and Tanya Collavo. Find out about their idea to create a Tinder for researchers and hear ideas that emerged from the conference via interviews with participants.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mark Reed, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Timnit recently completed her postdoc in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) group at Microsoft Research, New York. Prior to that, she was a PhD student at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. She also co-founded Black in AI, an organization that works to increase diversity in the field and to reduce the negative impact of racial bias in training data used for machine learning models.
She was born and raised in Ethiopia. As an ethnic Eritrean, she was forced to flee Ethiopia at age 15 because of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. She eventually got political asylum in the United States. “This is all very related to the things I care about now because I can see how division works,” she explains during a conversation with Margot Gerritsen, Stanford professor and host of the Women in Data Science podcast. “Things that may seem little, like visas, really change people’s lives.”
Last year, she said that half of the Black in AI speakers could not go to NeurIPS because of different visa issues. “And in that 20 seconds, that visa denial, it feels like the whole world is ending for you because you have an opportunity that’s missed… Not being able to attend these conferences is much more important than people know.”
She has learned through her work with Black in AI that the number one thing we need to do is empower people from marginalized communities, which is why diversity, inclusion and ethics are not at all separate. It’s essential to have a wider group of people in the world determining where AI technology goes and what research questions we pursue. She says the industry has been pretty receptive to her proposals around norms, process and transparency because they are easier to operationalize. However, there are other things like racism and sexism where we need a fundamental shift in culture.
She has seen the potential for unintended consequences with AI research. Her PhD thesis at Stanford utilized Google maps data to predict income, race, education level, and voting patterns at the zip code level. She saw some follow up research using a similar methodology to determine what kind of insurance people should have. “And that is very scary to me. I don’t think we should veer off in that direction using Google Street View.” She says she wishes you could attach an addendum to your earlier research where you talk about your learnings and your intentions for how the work be used. Timnit is currently working on large-scale analysis using computer vision to analyze society with lots of publicly available images. She says it’s critical that she also spend a lot of time thinking about the consequences of this research.
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In October of 2019, Google announced their supercomputer had reached quantum supremacy. With that announcement, and as we take a short break for the holidays, we thought we should replay a prior Big Brains episode for you with David Awschalom, one of the world’s leading quantum scientists.
Awschalom is turning what was once in the realm of science fiction into reality—which could offer revolutionary breakthroughs in communications, digital encryption, sensor technology and even medicine.
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