For no reason at all, I made a simple one-page guide for self-publishing research without relying on journals or other centralized gatekeepers. It covers: – DOI deposits via Zenodo – FAIR repositories – crawlable HTML for Google + AI systems – metadata, licenses, datasets, code, and protocols

Before saying yes to something, ask yourself: will I hate this with my whole soul when the deadline/event arrives

First things first

I have some jokes about faculty jobs but the same 8 of you will get all of them

This but for scientists

Despite these difficult and uncertain times, I have some big news: The Avasthi Lab is moving! I’ll be joining @GeiselMed @Dartmouth as Associate Professor of Biochemstry & Cell Biology!

#ScientistsTakeAKnee I’m taking a knee to protest racial injustice and police brutality.

Confirmed: PIs everywhere are terrorizing lab members with their New Years energy and refreshed excitement. Hang in there folks! This too shall pass

I love exclamation point email folks. They feel like my people

I have a serious lifehack. This is the singular thing that has been a game changer for my professional life. Surround yourself with people who make you want to be better. Not more self-serving. Not more successful. But closer to who you hope you have the courage to be.

Young scholars, give yourself the unfair advantage of carving out regular time for reading & thinking. The limited experiments you can do with your hands can seem like the bottleneck to progress, but the bigger cumulative impact is from the unseen intellectual bottleneck

I don’t know who needs to hear this but apply for that thing

Pretending like it’s the hardest job in the universe

Lol you give your office for ONE DAY to @phylogenomics and he does this 😂

Raise your hand if your 10 second thought experiment about winning mega millions involved funding your lab in perpetuity. 🙋🏽‍♀️

As former chair of the eLife board of directors, I have just signed this

As a postdoc, I gave a well received talk at a GRC. As I stepped away for the next speaker, session leader Bruce Goode announced to the whole room I was on the job market & they should invite me out. The bulk of my faculty interviews came from that room. Small act, huge impact.

This is wild!

Once again highlighted in response to a question at the announcement was no NIH R01 or academic tenure at Penn for Karikó but a VP position at BioNTech, a company that produced a highly effective vaccine

So excited to share the final product of my experimental prioritization flowchart made beautiful by the AMAZING folks at @ibiology for our new course! Feel free to use and share! (CC-BY-NC-ND) Course: courses.ibiology.org/courses…

Man, I love my lab. Student was waiting on a critical result for something she tried to get working for a while. Lab was on such pins & needles that they all went with her to the imager to find out the outcome. Love it! What a supportive group of curious & invested scientists.

We invite you to write a book chapt...

You ever walk into your lab, find the lovely people sciencing + enjoying each other’s company and feel like the luckiest person in the world? 🙋🏽‍♀️

Feels like most of us will never be as good at anything as @PeteButtigieg is at what he’s doing rn

It’s not that I didn’t see your job ad. It’s that I know too much to RT it.

Incredibly honored to be the awardee for the 2020 @ASCBiology WICB Junior Award for Excellence in Research! 🙏🏽Thanks so much to all the nominators & selection committee! And congrats to the mid-career and senior awardees! ❤️

I removed some private information so I can make our onboarding document public. Here’s where I send new lab members so we start off on the same page: avasthilab.org/lab-policies-…

Burnout isn’t just from overwork, it can be from lack of agency to affect outcomes. I think people often blame the former when the problem is the latter

📣Hey new and aspiring PIs! Bob Goldstein @UNC_Biology & I wrote about starting a research lab: A Guide to Setting Up and Managing a Lab at a Research-Intensive Institution preprints.org/manuscript/202… #cellbio2020 @NewPI_Slack @FuturePI_Slack @GradSlack @Dart_PItrack

Here are some slides I show sometimes with data (from biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…) on skewed journal citation distributions. JIF is a preposterous and inappropriate measure of individual article quality. Don’t get beclowned by the JIF

Past me: Why can’t PIs get their act together & be in charge of their own schedule without all the reminders to keep them from missing appointments. Current me:

Complicated feelings about this given my impending departure but don’t want to erase the contributions of the many people from the lab, department, institution, & community (looking at you @NewPI_Slack) + support from family & friends that went into this. THANK YOU! 💖

I’m a fan of formalizing what people are supposed to osmose though their training so I love these tweets on the #hiddencurriculum of academia. I’ll start with a thread on cover letters (specifically for postdoc apps since I’m currently looking for one):

Some of the things supported by the overhead on NIH grants: - Building and laboratory maintenance (repairs, cleaning, security, electricity, water, heating, and cooling) - IT and communications infrastructure - Grants administration - Financial, HR, legal, regulatory, tech transfer - Library services (buildings, subscriptions, institutional repos, staff) -Shared research facilities (animal facilities and core services) - Environmental/lab safety - IRB, IACUC Many of these things are pretty essential for research. All of them are inefficient. Some are gear-grindingly outdated, slow, or a straight up unconscionable waste of money (e.g. the collective insanity of paying millions per institution to read the outputs of publicly funded research that also cost millions in direct costs to publish). Also, true of everything everywhere not just this: Bureaucracy is a ratchet. Any administrative process put into place to streamline or systematize an activity becomes a bloated mess that takes on a life of its own. If left unchecked, it WILL expand its operations to maintain its own existence above all and frequently lose sight of whether it’s actually effective for its initial purpose. It gets worse if there are people whose entire job it is to make, maintain, and expand these activities. And without vigilance to beat it back… well you’re just stuck with it forever. It is simultaneously true that a massive haircut on some pretty important activities supporting some pretty important research will have some catastrophic consequences for the status quo AND that unis would just torch public cash on ever-growing inefficiency if given the opportunity. When the dust settles, even if the decree doesn’t hold up, I hope uni admin puts some dedicated effort to actively questioning things that no longer make sense or have begun to obstruct scientific progress. The stewards of public money have a responsibility to make sure those dollars go as far as possible. The goal should not be to have nothing change ever just because things are currently at a shitty equilibrium everyone is used to. It was not fine. This blunt knife will yield chaos and likely some irreparable collateral damage on important things of outstanding economic value. And all for what amounts to saving a drop in the ocean. That shouldn’t stop everyone from trying to make better use of public money.

Couldn’t sleep until I took care of something last night. Snapped this on my way back to bed

5yo: Mom! We didn’t get to go to your work today to look at stuff! Husband: Don’t you want to go to Daddy’s work to look at flight simulators? 5yo: You don’t even have a microscope! My work here is done 😂😍❤️

I hate everyone and everything. Thank you for your support in this difficult matter.

🚨New Job Alert! 🚨 We’re looking for someone to lead our software engineering team at @ArcadiaScience! At Arcadia, we’re using evolution as a shortcut to find innovative solutions and efficiently launch biotech startups. We’re not just a science company, but one reimagining how we might accelerate scientific progress for everyone. Want to join us in our mission? Apply below! And if you know someone who might be interested, please spread the word! jobs.lever.co/arcadiascience…

We are underusing ChatGPT

We are a year and a half into this pandemic and I still have the same fundamental question: how does anyone have the energy for virtual conferences

Just so I stop getting contacted about it, this week I stepped down from the @eLife board of directors & as its chair. I’m proud of what we achieved together in my ~5.5 years there. Post preprints, friends. Reclaim your agency. A brighter future is in our hands. It always was

That idiotic tweet opened a bunch of wounds and I’ve been pissed off all day. Not because of some retired fossil but the dinosaurs thriving among us

This is also about something else. In publishing &science broadly, it’s alarmingly common that powerful scientists shamelessly abuse their connections to lobby for the status quo &against those who challenge it. This org was uniquely positioned to resist & was unequal to the task

Man it's exhausting feeling like you're constantly both over & under-reacting to covid since no one else is in precisely the same place re: risk, risk-assessment, and risk-tolerance

Learned today that NIH intends to fund my MIRA! This will fund us for 5 years to identify & dissect novel mechanisms of ciliary regulation. We’ll be keeping an eye out for enthusiastic new folks so, if our lab sounds like a good fit, please get in touch! avasthilab.org/join-us/

It’s here! NOTICE OF AWARD!!!

PI broken record: you only know what experiments are left to do (and even how to prioritize them) once you start writing. Write now. BEFORE you think you’re done collecting data.

Academia isn’t in trouble, it’s just experiencing a rapid unscheduled loss of postdocs

Being a PI can be isolating, the schedule grueling, with more decisions than you think any human should have to make. But I love it. Here’s what I and a few others thought about the adjustment to running our own labs. sciencemag.org/careers/2018/…

I promise it’s not a direct attack on your way of life if someone makes a career decision that works for them but isn’t what you chose

Looks like NIH grant review panels have been suspended temporarily. Because it takes time to coordinate and schedule a multi-layered grant panel review from experts across the country, what seems like a short delay in review of funding applications could be the difference between survival and shuttering for many valuable research efforts. I started my academic research lab a year before the erratic first Trump presidency and vividly remember the uncertainty of those times. The folks starting their labs now during second term are facing similar challenges. The situation is even more precarious for more established labs that don’t have stable university startup funds remaining and require external funding to continue to pay students, postdocs, & research staff to stay open. This situation highlights that diversification of funding sources for science is good, including for the basic science that sparks so much innovation. This could mean broadening research efforts in other sectors (private for-profit or non-profit R&D). The NIH may be the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world but over-dependence on a single sector so sensitive to political winds is bad. We need nuance and creativity in how to generate value that ensures science-driven progress. Many of us in the private sector are thinking about how to grow the pie and sustain research efforts. Our scientific ecosystem needs to be much more resilient. If you’re an academic researcher worried about your fate, there is a pretty big world out there and a lot of ways to contribute your scientific expertise to advance solutions for humanity. You can invent them too. And if you’re a private entity, you can start to decrease dependence on publicly funded academic research for upstream discovery by expanding impactful basic science activities strategically and sharing more of the outputs openly. Hope this message of agency resonates with those searching for solutions and a place for their energy.

We are open for business at @ArcadiaScience!

🚨Some news🚨 I am honored to join the other officers as the new president of @asapbio_! These are huge shoes to fill of some of my heroes, founder/former president Ron Vale and interim president @dacolon. A little history & info in this 🧵1/

Problem isn’t so much this guy and those who broadcast this nonsense as it is all those lurking with the same belief behind closed doors and the scant support when openly pushing back (that silence is also a statement)

New ASCB Newsletter is out. ❤️🙏Thanks so much for the kind words and the nomination @WallaceUcsf & all those who supported it!

Ha someone accidentally typed an extra “i” at the end of my name in an email and I think I should henceforth go by my species name, P. avasthii

I want to live in a world where a cover letter and preprint are the only things needed for initial submission of a paper. All else requested upon the decision to send out for review. Who’s with me!

A few months after I started my first academic lab, I told my postdoc PI @WallaceUcsf about how great it was he never did this kind of territorial nonsense. He said simply: “I’m not worried I’ll run out of ideas” And that, my friends, is the dictionary definition of a mic drop

I feel attacked

How many people do I have to know that went to conferences and got COVID for me to cancel my conference plans?

House we bought sight unseen is lovely 😭😭😭😭 I’ve never been more relieved!

So I guess this is what it feels like then. 10 yrs since my dad died. May you have someone in your life that believes in you the way he believed in me

I have the strong suspicion that folks who want more peer review opportunities don’t know about this: Review any preprint, send us the link for the review/comment, and we’ll pass to the many journals that will use this info to broaden their reviewer pool! asapbio.org/preprint-reviewe…

If I were interviewing for a postdoc position right now, *before joining* I would confirm I’d be able to preprint my work so I could list/share it for fellowship & job apps

We’ve been together since I was 19 (lived on the same floor at UIUC). Now, married for 14 years! Happy Anniversary to us!

Had our first in-person lab meeting today in 1.5 years. It. Was. Awesome.

I interact with a lot of PhDs looking for jobs in biotech. Something I personally think is poorly predictive of thriving as a professional scientist: whether you were in a winner-take-all authorship position on a research article curated by secret reviewers/editors into some flashy venue. Things I think are strongly correlated with thriving in ANY science job in any sector: • thinking critically about your own science and also proactively seeking feedback • avoiding textbook thinking about what has been reported in the literature • designing compelling approaches and experiments that have outsized informational value • being able to articulate clearly in writing your rationale and outcomes (essential for documentation, impact, and also signals clear thinking) • stellar execution beyond just ideas for whatever the scope of the role is • reading a lot and developing independent opinions, not exclusively relying on other people’s opinions about those things Many see this as some difference between what academia and industry want. I don’t think so. Of course academia wants great, rigorous scientists too (and wants to generate more of them) but very much rely on the opinions of other reviewers, panels, annointers. This leads to a Matthew effect of compound value and perpetuates a cycle of higher order opinions. Some suspend disbelief as signals of rigor and impact overcome the substance of it. Others simply reason that if these weak proxies are wrong, the system of yet additional decision makers (hiring committees, grant panels, tenure committees) will eventually weed people and poor science out. In industry, where there’s not an explicit training mandate, there’s a real cost and opportunity cost to lazy or suboptimal hiring practices. As in all sectors, the biggest threat to outcomes and a high performing team is low performers, and worse, leaders who can’t tell the difference. Even in academia where there’s a lot more individualism and a greater responsibility for growth/training, my academic friends and their lab members will easily recognize this cost because they’ve all been burned by it. They will recognize the proximal cost to themselves but I’d argue the collective cost to science is even greater. We need to all take on the responsibility to make the most out of our incredible privilege of doing science for a living and make sure our elaborate scientific bureaucracy (the “system”) doesn’t destroy its promise. So what’s the solution that’s in each of our hands? Focus on the actual skills needed to do rigorous science not cut corners in service of the proxies you think others rely on to judge — whether you’re developing talent, selecting for it, or setting your own bar for yourself as a scientist. For you young scientists at a crossroads, this is the one thing that will continue to pay dividends regardless of what you choose. Importantly, it will also set you apart from those who put all their energy in outdoing each other on the superficial signals but can’t see how far they’ve drifted from the true value of the research or how weak their scientific skills have gotten as a result.

Some people have the luxury to "let their work speak for itself" & have everything they do get magically noticed. Most don't. It's also no one's job to follow your life's work. So get up in people's face, shake them by the shoulders, and show them what you've done

Thrilled to receive this award from @ASCBiology!

I just cancelled 5 talks + 3 flights and have never felt more alive 😂 Bring it. I’ll cancel anything.

Apropos of nothing at all, harassers don’t harass everyone they know

If you're not happy single, you won't be happy married. Happiness doesn't come from relationships, it comes from a cancelled meeting

Humbled by this opportunity to reimagine how we share science, I’m thrilled to share the our pub about the beginning of the @arcadiascience publishing experiment! bit.ly/3PSPqJh

Frankly I think this is total bullshit. The biggest threat to deep thinking for academics is not technological distractions or productivity mindset but rather all the credit-, fame-, visibility-chasing activities that eat at time thinking about and doing science: - journal publishing chasing the false quality signals via journal stamps - excessive travel for CV padding and visibility for hiring/promotion/recognition - interminable conferences with lots of topic overlap and most of the usual participants - high volume grant writing required but largely incremental within one’s narrow scientific territory rather than pursuing where discoveries lead - too much time spent on peer review for gatekeeping purposes rather than for substantive improvement of the science If we fetishize a lot of things that are loosely justified by science but bear only a passing resemblance to it, there’s not going to be much time left for the substance of it

There are only two things I like about the Nobel prize: 1) it brings science and interesting advancements to the forefront of a broader swath of the global consciousness; and 2) it largely recognizes that impact in science is determined over time not by the proclamations of a few gatekeepers the moment nascent discoveries are first shared

Review articles often don’t “count” in academic evaluation, but I have learned so much & appreciate the contextual, historical information in review articles written by creative scholars. Such an important, yet devalued part of the scientific landscape

One clove of garlic, ✅

Special shirt for a special day

It’s true. I started my PhD over in a new lab/field 4.75 years in....profs kept telling me time lost was a drop in the bucket of a scientific life. This was hard to hear. Easy for them to say..what about my life plans? What about the gap I would have to explain forever? 1/

I don’t really want advice from people who have made leaving a career path their entire personality, especially if they continue perpetuate elsewhere the dysfunctions of the thing they’ve left. That said, the beauty of advice (especially the unsolicited kind found on here) is it can be discarded. Shit advice is hardly scarce

Today I was telling friends about a prof who believed in me when he didn’t have to. I will never forget his kindness. Paying it forward is not a one time deal but forever

Biggest eye opener for me as a #NewPI was that most decisions would be based on trying to keep everyone employed & achieve their goals within 5-6 years, using funding mechanisms that are usually staggered/shorter than that

IME, if you are frequently the most junior or the only woman or WOC in a space, you have to become effective at making your voice heard...which often gets interpreted as too aggressive or egotistical in other spaces. The assertiveness tuning, difficult to perfect, is exhausting

Science can be dark. Bad behavior. Bad culture. Bad incentives. But the creative, brilliant, bold, and deeply *good* people, looking to leave science better than they found it will fill your heart and soul.

I am struggling to respond because I could write a book on how I feel about this & how poor form this type of sabotage disguised as advice to students is. You are amazing, don’t let the assholes get you down, & feel free to reach out if you ever need an ear to rant

Preprint review pizza party at @ArcadiaScience! We read a ton of preprints here & since we want to live in a world where authors, reviewers, and readers all benefit from expert opinions, we’re posting a whole bunch public comments on preprints 🙌

Just received the loveliest gift ever from my former department @KUMedCenter. May you all have as generous and wonderful colleagues as I was blessed with 😭❤️❤️❤️❤️

It was spring 2020. I was a professor and had recently learned I’d successfully been awarded early tenure. At the tail end of a series of talks at other universities, a colleague had invited me to give a seminar at a stellar department that was an unusually great fit for my research - they were interested in recruiting me there. I was about to fly there a second time with my husband to more carefully consider moving my lab, husband, and then-6yo son to a place they’d never been. Two days before our trip, COVID shut down the country. I remember thinking, “am I really going to leave my perfect stable life where my family is happy…to move to a place I know so little about, to a house sight unseen, to a department I just visited for the first time ever?” The thing I remember most clearly from that time is the email I wrote to my new department chair. I said that every time I wonder if I’m crazy to take this leap, I remember how my parents moved to this country when I was 5 and my sister was 7. They left a comfortable life to a place where none of their professional credentials were recognized. My dad was the chief engineer on an oil tanker and retrained here as a software engineer, rose up in the ranks, and became senior manager in a lucrative tech company. My mom was a dentist who had to repeat 4 years of dental school entirely over in the states so she could do the work she already had infinitely more professional experience in than her classmates. Due to exchange rates and fees, any money set aside was decimated, and they started basically from scratch as they built up the skills to build a new life. All for the promise of uncapped potential for their kids. The decision I was grappling with in the aggressive safety of my life was a drop in the bucket of the leap of faith my fearless parents took for their kids. So when offered the position, I told my new department chair that by comparison, this felt easy - I accepted the offer without reservation. While I didn’t stay there long, I soon co-founded a company that employs even more people than my academic lab did, working on some of the most important problems at the leading edge of biotechnology. I feel so fortunate this country welcomes intellectuals and founders but also all those whose potential we cannot predict to create what we cannot imagine. America is the promise of what is not yet realized. Built by those who are not yet famous. The unique mix of creativity and talent and ambition and fearlessness from every corner of the world. It’s such a humbling and awe-inspiring idea we have the opportunity to fight for.

The strongest people I know are struggling & I implore everyone to let the hell up on the breakneck pace/overcompensation we seem to be doing despite unusual strain

Behold my unapologetic nerdery! Yes this is my office chair with a Chlamy pillow and ciliate throw

A lovely highlight about our lab. Learned this was live from my neighbor dartmed.dartmouth.edu/2021/0…

I continue to be blown away by people who started their labs during the pandemic. I did it twice: once the normal way & once during the pandemic after already rolling. The first time would have been *infinitely* harder under these circumstances. Hang in their folks. We see you

I remember feeling so isolated when starting the lab—alone & missing deep discussions about science. 3 years later, the lab is crushing it. Today has been full of stimulating conversations & exciting new data. What a privilege this is.

Shout out to you established investigators who are using your positions of power to pull people up. Providing mentorship, advice, & amplification to junior folks to whom you owe nothing. We see you and we appreciate you.

As a scientist, taxpayer, and entrepreneur working to develop a model of basic research in the private sector without NIH funds to accelerate/grow the path to effective human therapeutics: I think the NIH should expand rather than contract support for basic research AND that virtually all aspects of NIH funding of the same should be reformed so that every public dollar goes further.

It’s funny because it’s true 🤣

This right here is deeply flawed logic

Respectfully, if every single one of us took one tiny extra step forward (beyond what we're doing) to modify the reality we find so constraining in science instead of passing the buck or patronizing the young/vulnerable, things might be better. We are who we're waiting for.

Here we are folks! @fraser_lab and I dressed up as a preprint & a public comment 🎉

I don’t know who needs to hear this but your one risky activity doesn’t care how long you were good about COVID

Maybe we should rethink the conference concept from the ground up for the pandemic era instead of just holding our breath, waiting to go back to the way things were at any moment