“[Women] are just going to hit more hurdles,” says Joanne Kamens, executive director at Addgene, a nonprofit plasmid repository in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “They can even hit outright discrimination. It still happens, and it can be career-debilitating.”

But just because the odds are stacked against women doesn’t mean there isn’t room for success. The Scientist spoke with three women who are thriving in biotech and polled them for advice on excelling in an entrepreneurial environment.

Joanne Kamens: Science Roots

Education: Bachelor’s degree in biology, University of Pennsylvania; PhD in genetics, Harvard University
Title: Executive director, Addgene
Other positions:Founder of the Massachusetts chapter of the Association for Women in Science; Director of the Boston Mentoring Program of the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association

Joanne Kamens<span>Kenneth Fan</span>

Joanne Kamens is still a scientist at heart. After earning her PhD, she spent 15 years in the pharmaceutical division of the chemical company BASF (acquired by Abbott in 2001), where she worked her way up from bench scientist to group leader for molecular biology. Then, after restructuring at Abbott took away some of her research group’s flexibility for doing basic, “fun” research, she was ready for a change.

While still at Abbott, she had taken an interest in RNA interference—now a standard technique in many molecular biology labs. She started attending RNAi conferences, where she met Dmitry Samarsky, who worked at a company that made RNAi reagents. “It was the early days of RNAi, before there was off-the-shelf stuff,” Kamens says, so she offered to beta test some of the company’s products.

Not only did Samarsky help set her up with “speaking gigs,” but in 2007 she took a job as research director of his new company, RXi Pharmaceuticals, a small biotech that was working to develop custom RNA interference reagents. She knew right away it was just the new challenge she had been looking for, and gave notice at Abbott.

Kamens now works as the executive director of Addgene, a nonprofit plasmid distributor, with the goal of making custom plasmids accessible to scientists around the world. Although there is a business aspect, she’s working a lot more closely with academia, which she’s welcomed. “Addgene interacts with academic labs primarily,” she says. “It’s kind of full circle for me.”

Rachel King: Business to Biotech

Education: Bachelor’s degree in French, Dartmouth College; MBA, Harvard Business School
Title: Founder and CEO of GlycoMimetics
Other positions: Serves on the board of the Biotechnology Industry Association (BIO); Member, Maryland Life Sciences Advisory Board (appointed by Governor Martin O’Malley)

Rachel King

Growing up in the Ohio countryside, Rachel King took a quick liking to nature. “I had a dissecting kit and a microscope,” she says, and loved to examine things she collected in the woods. King considered going to medical school, but decided on business instead. She eventually wandered back to science, however, taking on a project with a biotech company while working at the consulting firm Bain and Company.

Despite having almost no biology training, King has excelled in the biotechnology arena—becoming part of senior management at Gaithersburg, Maryland-based biotech Genetic Therapy, Inc. (later acquired by Novartis) before founding GlycoMimetics, a company focused on developing small-molecule drugs for rare diseases, in 2003.

The key to her success, she says, has been attending scientific lectures at the companies where she has worked, and sitting down with the scientists afterwards to ask for explanations of concepts she didn’t understand. “I’m not trying to be a scientist,” she says, “but I can talk about our scientific story.” Her layman’s approach helps her translate the company’s science to investors and even to trained scientists, who need a digest of ideas outside their specialty, King notes.

“I really can’t think of anything else I would rather do,” she says. In addition to the business and the science, the promise of helping patients desperate for novel therapies “makes the whole proposition just incredibly meaningful.”

Daphne Zohar: Entrepreneur Extraordinaire

Education: Bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship, Northeastern University, Boston
Title: Founder and managing partner of PureTech Ventures
Other positions: Technology Development Fund Advisory Board of Children’s Hospital Boston, Tufts University School of Medicine Advisory Committee for Drug Discovery and Development.

Daphne Zohar<span>puretech ventures</span>

Daphne Zohar was 16 years old and living in Boston when she started her first company—selling watches from the Soviet Union that depicted symbols of perestroika, the Soviet political movement during the 1980s that is often cited as the end of the Cold War. “I imported them, and went door-to-door to different stores to distribute them,” she recalls. And she earned a profit.

Zohar then moved on to hosiery—designing a compact package about the size of a lipstick container. After patenting the product, the now 20-year-old inventor-entrepreneur licensed it to a bigger company.  Next it was olive oil, then a “sneaker” for horses. And in 2004, she began her current venture—a company to help others start up life sciences companies.

There are many of aspects to launching a company, she says—negotiating a complex license with a tech-transfer office, reading literature to understand the competition, and finding the funding. “As one individual, you may not be optimized to do all of those things,” she says. Zohar founded PureTech Ventures because she saw an opportunity in “institutionalizing the process of founding a company.” Based in Boston, PureTech brings together experts in those various areas to help translate research from academia into successful commercial enterprises. So far PureTech has helped launch 16 companies.

“I’ve always been drawn to the concept of starting companies,” Zohar says, “bringing together different components to realize the vision.”

Vrentas also values the fact that her work directly affects critical issues facing the nation. For example, her lab focuses on chronic wasting disease, a prion disease of species like deer and elk. Vrentas’s investigations help the USDA develop strategies to slow the spread of the disease in wild and domestic deer populations. The change of scenery has reignited Vrentas’ enthusiasm for doing science, she says, and she hopes to land a full-time position with the government after she completes her postdoc.

Despite the seemingly low profile of government jobs, positions with federal, state, and local governments made up about 40 percent of the approximately 91,300 jobs held by biological scientists in 2008. The Scientist talked to researchers from various government agencies to get the inside scoop on the perks and pitfalls of this alternative to academic life.

The Budget Picture

Pro: Academics spend a lot of time applying for grants, but the government, for the most part, takes care of its own. On the federal level, for example, internal research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the USDA, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) are all funded through congressional appropriations. This gives lead researchers more time to work on the projects that they signed on for. “I can order lab equipment without going through a week’s worth of paperwork and budgeting,” says Vrentas at the USDA. Some government researchers can also apply for outside funding to supplement their budgets. Eric Nicholson, a lead scientist at the USDA’s National Animal Disease Center (and Vrentas’s supervisor), can obtain additional research grants from sources such as the Centers for Disease Control, the NIH, the National Pork Board, and the Department of Defense, as well as from a number of private companies.

Con: Though government jobs tend to spare researchers from the woes of grant chasing, the vagaries of the federal budget can have immediate effects such as cancellation of research programs or forced relocation to a different job or department. “There are always concerns when the federal government has budget cuts,” says Nicholson. Today, budgets are diminishing across the board, which means government researchers can find it hard to make up for the reduced funds from other sources. And rules about obtaining outside funding vary from agency to agency.  

Research Focus

Pro: Like industry R&D, government research is expected to ultimately benefit the public, which many researchers find refreshing. “There’s a more complex set of activities than in academia,” says Gary Nabel, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It’s the scale and urgency of the research problems that drew Nabel from his former lab at the University of Michigan to his present government position, where he oversees research on HIV and influenza vaccines.

At the USFWS and US Geological Survey (USGS), research conducted by government scientists helps shape policy and regulations aimed at protecting the nation’s natural resources. For example, thanks to a 19-year project that Howard Jelks, a fish biologist with the USGS, helped implement, the status of the Okaloosa darter of southern Florida was downlisted last year from endangered to threatened. Jelks’s work showing the fish’s range and population numbers justified the reduction to threatened status, which had immediate management implications for decisions on whether to protect or develop surrounding areas.

Con: Some of the intellectual freedom of academia is lost when a researcher joins the federal government. While scientists at the USFWS might be assigned to a shad habitat-restoration program, they won’t have the flexibility to research the incubation periods of fertilized oocytes of the fish, for example. Although there’s room for innovation and exploration within a particular project, topics are usually assigned rather than freely chosen.

Staying Put

Pro: Once you’re in, so long as you’re productive, your job will probably be secure. During times of economic hardship, federal jobs tend to suffer less from downsizing and layoffs than comparable jobs in industry. “Science isn’t something that gets solved instantly; there’s no sense that you’re going to cure cancer in 15 minutes,” says Philip Lenowitz, an NIH deputy director of human resources. The NIH generally doesn’t do layoffs and doesn’t expect to in the future, he adds. Similarly, at the USFWS, so long as you continue to perform well, “you have a long career ahead of you,” says Richard Bennett, a Northeast regional scientist at the agency.

Con: Senior employees have “bumping rights” at the USGS.  More-established researchers can displace junior employees from positions, says Jelks, which can make for “a lot of shake-up” within the agency. In other words, when an office or project gets shut down, senior employees and those with a good performance history can replace more-junior workers doing similar research.

Moving up

Pro: A benefit common to all federal programs is their intra-agency variation. “I’ve probably held eight different jobs since joining the FWS in 1989,” Bennett says. “There’s a breadth of diverse opportunities within the organization.” At the USFWS, researchers can work on habitat restoration or on environmental aspects of energy or on highway development. At the NIH, scientists can hold staff positions, work in the clinic, or manage grants. For those bent on climbing the ladder, advancement is performance-based. So long as you’re productive in turning out high-impact science and publishing in prominent journals, you will advance, says Jelks at the USGS. “If you’re doing well, there’s nothing to hold you back.” At the NIH, advancement follows the academic model: from tenure track, to tenure, to PI, to lab chief. Other government organizations have their own particular systems for moving up. Advancement is usually based on performance reviews, which are conducted every one to five years, depending on the organization and position.

Con: The government job-application process can be confusing at times. The lingo is different, and it doesn’t follow the scheme of a typical academic job posting. When Nicholson first began the application process at the USGS, he wasn’t even sure if the advertised positions were for postdocs, PIs, or the equivalent to an academic department head. “The wording’s just not written in the same way as it would be in an academic setting, which everyone’s familiar with,” Nicholson says.  He suggests getting in touch with the researchers directly involved in the work  to find out the details.

Work-Life Balance

Pro: The governmental work scheme affords greater flexibility than is often encountered in academia. Logging hours at a government lab is much more structured, says Vrentas, who fills out a time sheet every couple weeks. She enjoys the formality of clocking in and out of work, and points out that, unlike in an academic lab, if she takes off early one day, her boss can see that she put in extra hours on a different day. The USDA also has an annual leave system that allows Vrentas to earn credit for extra hours worked, hours which can be rolled over to take time off in the future. Under this scheme, she says she feels much more productive than she did in an academic lab. “I could choose to work on things in my free time or work overtime, but I don’t have to,” says Vrentas. Nabel from NIH adds, “I work long hours, but that’s just me. I love what I’m doing, and when you love what you’re doing it doesn’t feel like work.”

Con:  Working in government, you won’t enjoy some of the perks allotted to university scientists. Researchers may earn a higher salary if they work at large state schools that happen to have prominent sports teams, for example. And at places like Duke or Emory, scientists’ spouses and children can attend the university for free. Though the government offers some tuition reimbursement, it can’t compete with the offer of a free education at a $55,000-per-year institution.

By The Numbers

Scientists have a lot of good reasons for making bad-looking posters. Mentors often tell students to go into the hallway and make a poster like the ones hanging there; posters present preliminary data, which is sometimes collected up to the last moment before a conference, making poster design and layout a last-minute affair. Finally, visual and graphic design is a specialty unto itself, and one that researchers rarely study.

However, there are important reasons for making concise, well-presented, and eye-catching posters. “We have really big brains, and a big part of that brain is dedicated to sight. If the poster doesn’t fit in some nice visual sense, it just doesn’t work,” and viewers are likely to move on, says Purrington, who has written an extensive online primer on scientific poster-making.

The Scientist talked to researchers who have sharpened their scientific pitches, as well as to graphic designers who understand the rationale behind color, font, and layout choices. Here’s their advice for making a better poster.

TIPS FOR DESIGN AND FORMATTING

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TIPS FOR CLEARER CONTENT

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Merck employees, for example, were overly confident that they had the best way of bringing new products to market. “They believed so strongly in themselves and in their hunches about these drugs that they could get themselves to just totally pour themselves in and engage,” says Randy Case, who analyzed Merck’s management strategies for his 1993 doctoral dissertation in strategy and organization at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “They thought they were the best R&D people in the world,” back then.

But Merck was gambling in an arena with alarmingly bad odds. According to a recent study, since 2004 only about one in 10 new drugs moves beyond Phase I trials to receive FDA approval, and billions of dollars are regularly poured into products that will eventually fail. The company was unrealistically confident that it could beat the odds. That optimism, Case says, may have led Merck employees to make decisions that more risk-averse researchers would probably have avoided. “We’re all really loss averse, unbelievably so,” says Case, who now runs a management consulting firm called Case Management Group that specializes in organizational development. Nobody likes to lose, so “we’ve got to give our mind a way to deal with that if we’re going to take risk. Overoptimism is one way.”

It’s very easy to be a bad decision maker.

—Nigel Nicholson, London Business School

This attitude is in stark contrast to the other company Case shadowed during his doctoral research—SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline). “They typically didn’t have a strong sense of confidence at all that what they were doing would succeed, or even that they were bringing first-rate expertise or management to bear on it,” he recalls. SmithKline’s more risk-averse approach to drug development was to distribute its resources across as many different projects and collaborators as possible—a strategy that has since been widely adopted by the industry.

Which business model ultimately proves to be more successful will vary, but Case’s research holds valuable lessons on the influence of human cognitive biases on decisions in biomedical research. In industry, such decisions can be both financially loaded and fraught with subjectivity—a precarious combination for any company, especially small biotechs. As in all areas of research, biases can alter the course of scientific discovery.

“Biases will affect how we assimilate information; biases affect actions, the things we choose to act upon; and biases affect our reactions to outcomes and often beliefs about the controllability of outcomes,” says Nigel Nicholson, a professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School. “It’s very easy to be a bad decision maker.”

Common biases

<span>Art Valero / Corbis</span>

Fear of failure

“Risk is a bad word because the norm in science is that really innovative ideas are often wrong,” says Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But if researchers dropped projects at the first sign of trouble because they were afraid of taking risks, science might have missed some of its greatest discoveries. SmithKline’s blockbuster drug for gastric ulcers, Tagamet, for example, only succeeded after the research team pursued a series of unproven approaches, thanks to the fearlessness of its leader, James Black, who later became a Nobel laureate. “In science, failure is a very frequent phenomenon and there’s nothing pejorative about it,” Leshner says. “Failure’s part of the process.”

Not letting go

Overconfidence is not the solution to overcoming fear of failure, however. Though Merck’s self-assured attitude of the ‘80s had some large payoffs, its home run frequency eventually waned, as the success rate of the company’s blockbuster ideas slowed dramatically. Overconfidence can lead researchers to cling to scientific ideas even in the face of contrary evidence—the so-called confirmation bias—which results in wasted resources dedicated to dead-end projects. “The confirmation bias is one of the major enemies of science,” says Nigel Nicholson of the London Business School.

Calling it skill, when it’s really luck

People who fall victim to what is known as attributional bias wrongly assume that a streak of good luck (or misfortune) is caused by their actions. This kind of mindset can be “fatal,” says Nicholson. If, for example, a company or research group runs five new projects each year for 3 years without a significant achievement to show for it, does that mean its strategy is flawed? With an average success rate of just one in 10 for drug discovery projects, there is actually more than a 20 percent chance it was just a run of bad luck. Because there is so much chance involved in scientific research, “the attributional bias is one of the most dangerous,” Nicholson says. “[It’s wrong to think], ‘When you get a good result, it’s because you’re a good scientist. When you get a bad result, it’s because you’re a bad scientist.’” It’s likely to be the persevering scientist who advances over one with a string of good luck.

Uncertain about uncertainty

“Almost all the data used within drug discovery comes from a model of sorts, whether it’s from an in vitro model, a predictive computer model, or an animal model,” which saddles all the scientific data with a measure of uncertainty, says Edmund Champness, director and CSO of Optibrium, a company that offers software designed to help researchers digest complex data. Understanding the trustworthiness of data and how this should inform decision-making takes careful analysis—something people tend to struggle with. “Often this uncertainty is ignored and the data is filtered by selecting hard cutoffs…which could ultimately be quite misleading,” Champness says. For example, researchers rule out candidate drugs based on particular qualities, such as affinity for a target. However, if its affinity value is within the accepted range but its uncertainty is high, another candidate with a slightly less optimal affinity value but lower uncertainty may be a better choice.

Tips for overcoming bias

Trim your variables

The best way to make good, unbiased decisions is to rely more heavily on the data. “The numbers matter,” Case says. Many scientific disciplines involve experiments with numerous variables, and statistical analyses can condense the data into a more manageable form. Applying a method known as principal components analysis to detailed morphological measurements of mastodon tusks, for example, paleontologist Kathlyn Smith at Georgia Southern University was able to combine 10 variables, such as tusk length and circumference, into just two components that explained most of the variation among individuals. “It really does reduce the complexity of having so many different variables,” she explains. “Instead of having 5 or 10 different plots for each of 21 mastodons, each one is going to have a score [for each of the two principal components] that’s going to be a combination of all the different measurements.”

Make data easy on the eyes

When researchers struggle to digest spreadsheet upon spreadsheet of numbers, looking at the data in a more visual way can often help identify patterns. Computer programs such as SpotFire and Imaris can slice and dice the data and depict it visually in a number of different ways, allowing the user to manipulate certain variables and test assumptions. “It’s not just passively looking at the data, but actively exploring it,” says Andrew Chadwick of Tessella, a science technology company that advises biotech and pharma companies on how to make their research more efficient and effective. “I’m a strong believer in the power of the picture to help people see things they might have otherwise missed.”

Put it to the computer

For extremely complex data, such as large-scale screens that measure drug compounds’ potency, solubility, and bioavailability, among other variables, computer software may be necessary to gain a full understanding of the results. Software programs such as Tripos’s Muse or Optibrium’s StarDrop are specifically aimed at helping researchers to make decisions during the drug discovery process, and even to identify some compounds that may have been overlooked. For example, while working with a client aiming to develop a drug for pain, drug discovery consultant Alan Naylor entered the structures of a handful of promising compounds into StarDrop. The program flagged a number of compounds with a high affinity for the hERG potassium channels in the heart, a binding propensity that is associated with potentially fatal arrhythmias in patients. With that information, Naylor could modify the structures in StarDrop into ones with a lower predicted risk of hERG complications. “It pointed us in the right direction,” says Naylor, who is on the scientific advisory board of Optibrium.

Diversify the decision makers

It can be difficult when others don’t agree with your ideas, but listening to constructive criticism is a healthy way to go about making complex decisions such as those involved in research. In industry, creating a leadership team diverse in background and experience can help overcome both the risk-averse and overconfident mindsets that can hamper good decision making. “The more homogeneous a group is, the more likely they are to reinforce each other’s bad decisions,” Nicholson says. “You need people who are able to challenge each other.” Indeed, management research has “shown again and again that groups with diverse people make better decisions than groups that are alike,” Case says.

Similarly, “the peer-review process is structured, at least in part, to address [confirmation bias],” says Mary Woolley, president and CEO of Research!America. Granting committees, for example, are composed of a diverse group of scientists and even some nonscientists, to help avoid funding projects that are simply trying to confirm the favorite hypothesis du jour. But even before you submit a proposal, you can get similar advice from your more immediate peers, she adds. “So people have a reality check, rather than just being there in the comfort of their own mind.”

Give it a go

Because of the lag time between a decision made and its outcome, researchers don’t have the luxury of trial-and-error learning. Thus, scientists must learn from the successes and mistakes of others. Software programs that simulate the decision-making process can provide people with “training that accelerates their experience,” says Chadwick. Technology consultancy Tessella, for example, offers an interactive training module on its website that steps viewers through a series of real-life drug-screening scenarios, in which a user must choose the best strategy for a set of candidate compounds. The program provides immediate feedback on the consequences of the decision by estimating the impact of different research strategies on pipeline value, given the anticipated risks, costs, and potential payoffs of a particular project.

Similarly, STRATPHARM from INSEAD, an international graduate business school and research institution, is a role-playing game that simulates the typical stages of drug development and marketing using industry-derived data, noting whether each project was a success or a failure and showing the associated earnings or losses. When both marketing and research colleagues play the game, it promotes discussion of real-world scenarios. What occurs is “a meeting of the minds between research and marketing people by looking at risk and potential outcomes over a spread of projects,” explains Chadwick, who took part in a STRATPHARM course when he was the head of R&D information systems at Boots Pharmaceuticals in the 1990s. “There was a faction [of Boots employees] wanting to invest mostly in safe but limited-potential [projects]. Others wanted to take greater risk. It was interesting how taking part in the game helped the two to understand each other’s perspectives better.”

For Elser, now a member of ASU’s Distinguished Teaching Academy for excellence in teaching and research, it came down to how he wanted to spend his time. “I developed this feeling that if I’m having fun during the lecture, delivering the material, then the students have fun,” he says. “If it’s frustrating for them, it’s frustrating to me, and that’s not fun.”

Having more fun while teaching—and becoming a better teacher in the process—is possible, without sacrificing too much research time. “It doesn’t take that much added effort to do a good job instead of a passable job,” says Elser. Plus, there are added benefits: “I became an effective communicator,” he says. “I’ve had people come up to me at a scientific meeting and say, ‘You teach a lot, don’t you?’”

The Scientist picked the brains of a number of notable college-level educator-researchers for tips on how to make teaching more enjoyable and effective, and still have plenty of time for your research.

Reduce the time you spend floundering

Throughout graduate and postdoctoral training, scientists surround themselves with mentors who show them the ropes on everything from how to give a good presentation to laboratory etiquette. Getting that first professor-level job may feel like a big relief: finally you have a chance to run your own shop. But don’t get overconfident yet. Receiving mentoring is the best way to learn how to be a scientist; why not do the same thing to improve your teaching?

Many universities have established co-teaching programs, but if your university hasn’t, Elser says, you should insist upon it. “It’s the best strategy to help faculty juggle their teaching and research,” Elser says. By teaching your first classes alongside experienced teachers, you share the load, reduce the time you might spend floundering through new lesson plans, and ease the psychological pressure of teaching a big class.

Clicker your students

Charlene D’Avanzo, an ecologist at Hampshire College and editor of the book Student-Active Science: Models of Innovation in College Science Teaching, recommends using “clicker questions” to collect data about your students and get an immediate sense of their struggles. Clicker questions are multiple-choice queries asked aloud during class to expose common misconceptions about the covered material, with the students’ answers tallied up publicly. Testing the state of students’ knowledge throughout the semester, even just a couple times, ensures that you’ll cover all the bases without wasting time on material the students already know, D’Avanzo says.

For example, she’s noticed that “many students think that air is nothing—that because you can’t see anything, there’s nothing there.” To get at the root of this misconception, she could ask her class where plants get most of their nutrients, and direct her lecture based on their answers.

Sharing the data from these clicker questions with the students gives them feedback that is critical for their learning. “It’s a way for the students to look around and see how they fit in and what they need to do,” D’Avanzo says. This awareness allows the students to direct their own learning, which benefits both them and the teacher.

The trick is to devise these questions around common misconceptions, which are “the basis for some extraordinary fundamental misunderstandings in biology,” she says. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Many resources for constructing clicker questions are available on the Internet (see box on page 63). This method “allows you to see your classroom as a way to establish a hypothesis,” says D’Avanzo. “It’s very intellectually stimulating.”

Test your lab’s independence

Planning a research schedule more than a few weeks in advance can be difficult: you never know when a student or collaborator will have a breakthrough that requires your immediate attention. But while your research can be unpredictable, teaching is less so.

“As far as the teaching goes, there’s an ebb and flow to the semester,” says Kevin Williams, a chemist at Western Kentucky University. Your students will demand more of your time around exams or when the material is more difficult, and those are periods you can predict based on your syllabus. When Williams approaches a teaching-heavy period, he makes sure the students in his lab can move forward on their projects with little input from him. “We try to interpret our recent data and come up with a series of experiments and tasks that they can complete in the upcoming days,” he says. During those teaching-intensive times, he’ll jot down notes on his research projects and “summarize the progress.” This helps him to “refresh [his] memory quickly”—both for the moment, and for the next time he meets with students to discuss new developments.

Get a shoebox

A suggestion box may not seem like the most glamorous teaching method, but it is incredibly useful—and easy. “All you need is a shoebox and some index cards,” says D’Avanzo.

At the end of a lecture, give the students a minute to respond to the question: “What do you understand least about today’s lecture?” The responses give you feedback specific to that lecture or topic, which you can then sample to hone your material accordingly. These responses are often quite useful because they monitor student reactions and learning in real time, unlike year-end teacher evaluations, which rely on students’ recall and might be biased due to grades or exhaustion.

Teach your research

Paul Williams, a plant pathologist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, developed a Brassica plant with a rapid life cycle for his research on disease-resistant vegetables, and it didn’t take him long to realize that his creation “might be useful for teaching principles of plant biology.” Today, through the Wisconsin Fast Plants Program, which he developed, his Brassica plants have been shipped to thousands of classrooms around the world.

The key element that his plant project provides is ownership, says Williams. Student engagement with research materials—whether plants or microbes—“is associated with a measure of responsibility and uncertainty that heightens awareness” about the scientific process. The act of participating in research forces students to “investigate the questions themselves,” he explained, and this frees the teacher to be more of a curator of learning, reduces lecture time, and provides more opportunities to have fun with students. “It’s such a great model,” says Mike Wolyniak of Hampden-Sydney College, whose students help with his genetics research during lab. “Plus, we actually generate data.”

Ask for 4 years’ notice

Learning to teach can be trying enough without having to relearn new material every year to prepare for a wide variety of classes. The best thing administrators can do for their faculty and for the quality of teaching is to give them a consistent, predictable teaching schedule, “teaching the same or similar classes year after year,” says Elser. “It’s the most efficient strategy for all involved.”

Elser suggests bringing this up during your contract negotiation. Insist on receiving your schedule 4 years in advance, and “hopefully you’ll only need to do three or four course preparations” during that time. That way you’ll just need to give your syllabi a little fact check and update, leaving more time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, and how each class could be better.

Make small groups work in big lecture halls

You hear over and over that small groups create a better classroom experience, but organizing them may seem like too much work. Wolyniak disagrees: “Anything I can do that doesn’t involve me standing and yakking for fifty minutes at a time makes my job easier.” Lecturing invites students to “mentally drift off,” he argues, but having them engage with one another and the material through problem solving or short discussions “keeps the students more excited.”

Anything I can do that doesn’t involve me standing and yakking for fifty minutes at a time makes my job easier.

— Mike Wolyniak

Bill McKeachie, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and author of McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, now in its 13th edition, used to do a lap around the lecture hall, assigning rows to face forward or backward in order to organize his students into six-person groups for a six-minute discussion. “Students learn more talking to each other than they do listening to a lecture,” he says. “One of the best ways of clarifying one’s understanding and remembering a concept is to explain it to someone else.”

Remember: you’re not Superman

“I’m a perfectionist by nature,” says Wolyniak—and he knew going into teaching that he was going to have to wrestle with that. Since you might need to relearn material just a few days before you teach it, expecting yourself to have all the answers is just setting yourself up for failure. Admitting that you don’t know something is not the end of the world. “If you don’t allow yourself a little bit of breathing room to make a mistake, you’re not going to succeed,” Wolyniak advises. “Try not to be Superman.”

Because, of course, you’re not Superman. Teaching is a learning experience for the professor as well. “I began to learn hugely from my students,” says Williams. Just watching them react to his teaching methods—especially when they were successful—not only improved his technique, but increased his desire to be a better teacher. “If you approach your teaching as a student, learning as you go, the reward is self-evident.”

But after Timme-Laragy had begun to work full-time following her maternity leave, she realized that something was amiss. She hadn’t planned for how exhausted and run-down she’d feel going in to work after a string of sleepless nights and seemingly endless feedings. One day in the lab, she was struck by one of the dizzy spells she’d been experiencing for a few weeks. Rather than dissipating after a little while, this one continued for several hours. Timme-Laragy and Hahn called for the on-campus medics, who administered oxygen to the postdoc. But her dizziness persisted.

She called her doctor, who had no open appointments but advised Timme-Laragy to seek immediate medical attention. Hahn drove her to the ER, where she received her diagnosis: exhaustion-related dizzy spells. She had landed in the hospital again “after a few months of being back,” in the lab, Timme-Laragy recalls. “It was pretty intense.” She received fluids at the emergency room and over the course of a few days recovered her strength. But Timme-Laragy took away important lessons about how to best transition back into the lab after maternity leave. “Part of it was not knowing what to expect,” she admits. “I didn’t anticipate the whole mommy-brain syndrome.”

There are as many different ways of handling parental leave as there are universities.
—Cathee Johnson Phillips

With her five-year fellowship ending in 2012, Timme-Laragy has already submitted her first manuscript for publication. She has been working on writing a chapter for a book to which she was invited to contribute, and has compiled most of the data for a second paper. Last spring, she and her husband welcomed another son, Steven, into their family. The second time around, Timme-Laragy returned to the lab at the right pace for her—working part-time for the first three weeks.

Having employees go on leave can create a strain in a fast-paced work environment such as a lab. “As a PI, you want to move the work forward, and sometimes it can be really frustrating” when team members take maternity or paternity leaves, says Harvard immunologist Judy Lieberman. “On the other hand,” she says, “I believe that people can only be effective when they’re happy and doing what they want in their life.” Here are tips on how to plan for taking time off as a new mother or father, and how to minimize the disruption to your research.

LANDING A FAMILY-FRIENDLY POST

Whether you’re interviewing for postdoc spots or hunting for your first faculty position, the crucial step towards successfully balancing a family and career in science is choosing the right place to work. Though the competition for good faculty and postdoc positions can be fierce, vetting an institution for its flexibility toward family needs should be an important part of your search process. You probably shouldn’t blurt out your imminent plan to start a family during that first face-to-face interview, but here are a few roundabout ways to get a sense of how your prospective employer feels about maternity or paternity leave.

Ping HR
You can find out a lot about an institution’s policies on family leave before you even get an interview with a department head or PI by searching the Web site of its human resources department. Although federal law (the Family and Medical Leave Act) mandates allowing up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for qualified employees, state regulations and institutional policies can add to this period and alter its terms. “There are as many different ways of handling parental leave as there are universities,” says Cathee Johnson Phillips, executive director of the National Postdoctoral Association. A prospective employer’s HR site is “not something that a postdoc looking for a faculty position thinks to look at,” says Gail Simmons, provost and VP for academic affairs at Manhattanville College in New York. But, she continues, it could make the difference between choosing a work environment that’s supportive and one that isn’t.

Investigate tenure policy
Academic job seekers should also familiarize themselves with institutions’ tenure policies, adds Simmons. She advises that you comb faculty handbooks or ask questions of HR like: “Can you stop a tenure clock for a life event?” Again, policies differ among universities, and the best way to find out whether or not you can take time out for a new baby without seriously damaging your chances for timely tenure is to do your homework before you ever sit for an interview.

Stay alert on tours
Once you do get an on-campus interview, you’ll probably be taken on a tour of the department to see the facilities and meet other faculty or employees. Keep your eyes and ears open as you stroll about. Are there toys or children’s books stashed in the corner of a faculty member’s office? This may mean that they sometimes bring their children to work and that the department is more family-friendly.

Mingle with insiders
Often, job candidates are invited out to dinner with current faculty or lab members as a part of the interview process. This could be a crucial time to feel out the family-friendliness of an institution, department, or lab. As the tone gets looser and more informal, ask how many of your potential colleagues have children, when they had them, and what their experiences were like. “You’ve kind of got to listen to the chitchat,” Simmons says.

Engage the help of friends
Chances are you know someone now who has some kind of connection at the place where you’re interviewing. Get your friend to ask around about attitudes towards family leave without blowing your cover, then report back to you.

Ask about campus child care
A major part of successfully juggling parental and career duties is finding appropriate and convenient child-care options. Many universities and research institutions have facilities nearby or on-site. But Simmons warns that some child-care facilities on or near university campuses will accept the children of students, but not those of faculty members.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK
Once you’ve secured a fellowship or faculty position in a place that is amenable to maternity or paternity leave, you can take steps that will decrease the disruption your absence causes—and that may even help your own research continue while you’re out. Here are a couple of things to implement long before you start trying to make babies.

Make friends
Tensions and competitiveness can run high in labs, but making friends with your colleagues right off the bat can make taking family leave a lot easier. Daniel Gorelick, a postdoc studying how hormones affect zebrafish development at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, learned this firsthand when his son, Simon, was born last year. As for many researchers, providing constant care for his live animal subjects was a top priority. Gorelick says it was essential for him to get on good terms with the people in his lab, especially the lab manager and the fish technician, so that he wouldn’t have to worry. “It’s good to make friends before you need them,” says Gorelick.

When it was time to take her maternity leave in early February, Lorraine Tracey, a postdoc studying drug resistance in neuroblastoma at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, says she wishes she had done a better job at building bridges. “I kind of never envisioned having to rely so much on other people to do stuff for me,” Tracey says. “I play my cards pretty close to my chest, and in this case, that wasn’t smart.” Tracey adds that instead of just interacting with her labmates during scheduled lab meetings, she should have discussed her projects with them so that she’d feel better about their taking over certain aspects of her research, such as performing Western blots and real-time PCR, and determining when to end animal experiments based on measurements of tumor size.

<span>ivanastar / Istockphoto.com</span>

Don’t wait, collaborate
Besides making friends within the lab, researchers set on becoming mothers and fathers should also focus on forming collaborative connections outside the lab. The more your project involves researchers at other institutions, the less likely it is that your leave will negatively impact the overall momentum of the work. Timme-Laragy says that having collaborators at Emory University in Atlanta who do mass-spectrometry analysis of her zebrafish tissue samples was invaluable, because she had a stack of material ready to send to them for analysis before she went on her second maternity leave. They were able to process the samples while she was away. Gail Simmons, of Manhattanville College in New York, agrees that forging collaborations is a good idea, saying that professional relationships with scientists at other labs, and perhaps other institutions, can cushion researchers from disruptions in research caused by illness, pregnancy, or other life events.

SO YOU’RE HAVING A BABY?
Now that you’ve announced your big news, do everything you can to reassure your labmates, collaborators, and advisors that your maternity/paternity leave will not completely disrupt your research. “If I knew, as a supervisor, that my employee had thought through those things already and showed that they had a plan, I’d know that there was a good possibility that when they came back things would be very stable,” says Simmons. Lorraine Tracey adds, “The most important thing is that you’re pregnant for nine months. It gives you tons of time to plan experiments so that your most important experiments are not being done while you’re not there.” Beyond trying to get your most important work done before you duck out, here is a checklist to help you organize your thoughts before you disappear to welcome your new addition to the family.

A status report
Write out a detailed description of your research project for your advisor and any colleagues who may lend a helping hand while you’re out. Include details such as
• your current phase of research or writing,
• what experiments you have completed, which ones are in progress,
• which will be conducted in the future,
• any problems or challenges that have or might come up,
• estimates of how much time each of these pieces will take,
• lists of animals or plants that need to be maintained, and
• arrangements needed to help accomplish necessary tasks while you’re out.
Provide your lab or supervisor with this report a couple of months before the due date, and present an update one month before you’re scheduled to leave.

<span>Floortje / ISTOCKphoto.com</span>

Copy your lab notebook
Make time to copy and distribute your lab notes and protocols to all who might oversee your work while you’re away. Your lab notebook may contain crucial information that could help your colleagues avoid making disastrous mistakes in your absence. “If you’re the only one that knows all the pieces that you do, it becomes a real arduous task to prepare” for an extended absence from the lab, says Jody Smiley, a senior clinical analyst at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. But if all of your methodologies and protocols are clearly spelled out in your lab notebook, the people filling in for you have a template to follow.

Don’t forget teaching
If you teach or TA classes, you’ll also need to make arrangements for their continuity while you’re out. Craft detailed syllabi and lesson plans for the person who will be filling in for you in the lecture hall.

Then in August 2008, Lieber learned that a short grant application he had filed was going to pay off in a big way: he was to be awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award, a $2.5 million, five-year grant designed for high-risk research projects. According to NIH, these awards fund high-impact ideas that are dubbed too novel, that span too diverse a range of disciplines, or are at a stage too early to fare well in the traditional peer-review process.

The award marked a shift in Lieber’s research career, he says. Two years later his team published a breakthrough invention—a virus-size probe that can enter a cell and monitor action potentials without affecting the cell’s structure (Science, 329:830-34, 2010). “I had a lot of these ideas for years,” says Lieber, “but this would have been really, really difficult without the Pioneer.” Today, more than half his team works on cell-nanoelectric interfaces.

NIH will invest at least $108 million in visionary research this year through its four high-risk grant programs: the Pioneer Award, the New Innovator Award, the Transformative R01 Program, and the EUREKA Awards. Numerous other organizations also offer awards for innovative projects (See sidebar on opposite page: “Beyond Federal Funding”). Such awards “try to allow people the opportunity to pursue an out-of-the box idea,” says Ravi Basavappa, manager of the Transformative R01 program in the Office of the Director at NIH. But because of their popularity, “the competition is quite keen,” he adds.

To give you a leg up on the competition, here are some tips for securing your own high-risk grant, including advice from researchers who took one home, and the inside scoop from NIH itself.

Straight from NIH: Tips from the top

Make them call you crazy

At a 2008 retreat, engineer Andrea Armani of the University of Southern California (USC) overheard researchers complain about the difficulty of trying to measure DNA methylation using PCR. “I should come up with a better way of detecting [DNA methylation] so you don’t need PCR,” Armani told them. “That’s impossible,” they replied, staring at her as if she were crazy. But NIH didn’t think so: last fall, Armani was awarded a New Innovator Award—$1.5 million over five years to develop a nanolaser capable of detecting methylation of a single strand of DNA.

Nothing in your application is more important than the big idea, says Judith Greenberg, principal leader of NIH Director’s Pioneer and New Innovator Awards. “There’s no substitute for presenting a truly, highly innovative idea,” she says. Without that, “nothing else that you do is going to matter.”

Dig up your best science-fair projects

A great idea is the first step, but the second is to convince a reviewer that you’ll be able to deliver. Reviewers for the Pioneer and New Innovator Awards want applicants to demonstrate evidence of past innovativeness. Since preliminary data is not required, the reviewers will want examples of your past creative, groundbreaking research to vouch for you. The NIH recognizes that many applicants, especially for the New Innovator Award, are young investigators without long track records, so don’t be afraid to strut your stuff from postdoc or even graduate school days, says Greenberg. “We just want some indication of how they think and whether they are really creative, innovative people,” she says.

Get a hotel room

“It’s tricky,” says Valentin Dragoi, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and winner of a 2010 Pioneer Award. “Sometimes with complexity, we hide how cool an idea is.” To keep himself on task while at a conference, Dragoi closeted himself in a hotel room for three days to write his grant application. “It was miserable but it paid off in the end,” he said—the isolation worked well for writing. In particular, Dragoi tried to constantly remind himself to think about the big picture.

Skip the all-star recommendation

Applicants sometimes submit letters of recommendation from big names in their field, yet these letters are often the weakest because the authors don’t always have a close relationship with and detailed knowledge about the applicant. “It’s generally better to have someone who knows you well [write the letter], even if it’s not somebody who is a household name,” says Greenberg. Details are valuable, agrees Dragoi: “the letters of reference should attest to your ability to solve problems, and point out when you’ve been successful.”

How they did it: five grant writing tips

1. Keep it simple

Explaining the physics of a nanolaser capable of detecting DNA methylation is not necessarily a simple task, but USC’s Armani made it her mission to write the five-page essay required for a New Innovator Award using language that was as jargon-free as possible.

“Make it easy on the reviewers,” says Armani. “Literally make a heading in the proposal that says, ‘This proposal is innovative because it ____,’ and fill in the blank.” After completing her essay, Armani asked friends to read it to assure that it was simple and convincing before she submitted the grant.

2. Document…with pizza

To prove an idea is truly innovative, it’s important to thoroughly document research in the area, emphasizes Dragoi. But reading your weight in papers isn’t something you have to do alone. For his Pioneer Award grant application Dragoi reached out to students and postdocs in his lab to help find and document all the papers he would need to demonstrate that the project proposal was novel (and grad students often work better when plied with pizza). “People shouldn’t be afraid to ask their postdocs and students, who understand the game, to help with good documentation,” he says. Although many grant applications restrict the length of citations, it’s important to know what’s out there, adds Dragoi, so you can confidently assert that your research will be novel.

3. Reduce the risk

At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Nathalie Agar wanted to develop a mass spec that could be fitted into a surgical probe to collect cellular data in real time. The information would help identify the margins of a brain tumor, allowing neurosurgeons to make more accurate cuts. In her application Agar acknowledged these risks, but then emphasized her training with a neurosurgeon who helped pioneer an MRI used during surgery, and cited Brigham and Women’s track record for creating innovative neuroimaging tools. She made it clear in her application that the risks were “well-calculated and buffered by all these different components.”

4. Show your planning

A Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations winner, Transderm Inc., is developing a painless, low-cost, no-refrigeration vaccine delivery system that could increase vaccine access to at-risk populations, and potentially improve vaccine efficacy. <span>Courtesy of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation</span>

Any project, even one labeled “high risk,” has to be realistic, so make an effort to show the details of how it can be done, says Agar. “Writing the essay, I was almost putting together a business plan,” she notes, setting forth a concept and then profiling how she intended to fulfill it, including a feasibility assessment, and describing the potential market for the surgical probe. In addition to her training and collaborators, Agar described who would manufacture the parts of the probe, where in a hospital it could be used, and why it would be attractive to doctors. “You have to be very strategic about why you are in a position to make this work,” says Agar.

5. Never, never, never give up

“Keep plugging away,” says Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University School of Medicine. He wanted to design a vaccine against cholera and Campylobacter bacteria, both of which cause serious diarrheal diseases. His plan was to engineer a harmless version of the gut bacterium H. pylori to deliver the protective antigens, but the Gates Foundation wouldn’t bite. After being rejected twice for a Grand Challenge grant, Blaser resubmitted his application a third time without even revising the proposal and it was funded.

But be warned, NIH has a policy of not accepting applications that have not been specifically changed, says Greenberg. So if you’re submitting to NIH, revise at length ahead of time.