How We Work: Dr. Tyler Smith talks standing desks, cranberries, and coding to the Tron soundtrack

Our next guest for the How We Work series is Dr. Tyler Smith. Tyler is currently a research scientist for the Canadian government, but we first me while he was a faculty member in the department of biology at Eastern Kentucky University. 

Prepped and ready for sedge hunting in turkey season

Location: Agriculture and Agri-food Canada, Ottawa, Canada

Current Position: Research Scientist, Taxonomy of native crop wild relatives

One word that best describes how you work: Inertia would work. Reactive would be accurate too much of the time as well. I aspire to be a more mindful and deliberate in my approach. I struggle with the bad kind of perfectionism, which can be crippling when you get a manuscript 90% done. At that point it becomes irresistibly tempting to start something new, rather than complete something that won't live up to your aspirations. That's a real productivity killer.

Current mobile devices: Nexus 5

Current computer(s):
Personal Laptop: Debian GNU/Linux on a Thinkpad x201 with 4GB RAM and 320GB HD
Work Laptop: Debian GNU/Linux on a Standard Issue HP Elitebook
Both computers run the same operating system with the same suite of programs. I sync my important configuration and documents via BitBucket.

Digital Ocean Droplet with 512MB RAM, 20GB HD for my website and Owncloud storage
If you like tinkering with computers, Digital Ocean provides really good value. $5/month gets me my own virtual server. So far, other than serving a static Jekyll-generated website, I use it to host my OwnCloud instance. Owncloud is a Free Software replacement for Google Drive or Dropbox. It offers the same sort of features, but you control the whole system. Nobody is mining it for ad revenue, and I know the owner (me!) isn't in cahoots with the NSA or CSEC.

Another cool thing about Digital Ocean is that you can rent servers by the hour. So if you need to do some computationally intensive simulations and don't have access to a cluster, you can set one up for a few dollars a day, and shut it down as soon as you're done.

I expect I'll eventually install my own version control repositories, but until then I use both BitBucket and GitHub. Github is more popular, but BitBucket provides unlimited private repositories for free, so all of my manuscripts and coding projects go there.

High-performance clusters for simulation projects and next-gen sequencing projects.
My post doc was working on spatially-explicit community simulations, which introduced me to cluster computing. I'm gearing up to start working on next-generation sequencing data, so I'll be putting that experience to use as a taxonomist in future.

What apps/software/tools can't you live without?

Debian GNU/Linux
Debian provides a huge collection of Free Software, maintained by a chaotic but dedicated community of volunteers. Other than the programs I describe below, I use the i3 tiling window manager and spend a lot of time in Bash shells.

Emacs
It's not just a text editor, it's a lifestyle choice. The learning curve is steep, but in return you get an infinitely customizable workhorse.

R
It has its rough spots, but the enormous user/developer community means there's very little analysis I need to do that I can't either find a package for, or write my own scripts/packages to accomplish. Of course, my preferred interface is Emacs, via the ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) add-on. The knitr R package provides almost seamless integration of data analysis and manuscript preparation.

LaTeX
Writing manuscripts in LaTeX means I get to use the same tools I apply to coding (Emacs, version control with git or mercurial) to my manuscripts. And the integration of code and text in the same document with knitr is a game-changing approach to organizing manuscripts.

That said, Emacs and LaTeX are steep hills to climb. A more approachable version of the same workflow is using RStudio and Markdown. When I teach R workshops, this is the combination I recommend.

Distributed Version Control
git is the most popular option, but I find mercurial a little simpler to use. Either one provides a very powerful way to track changes in multi-file projects, share code with others, and sync files between computers. Having just finished collaborating on a manuscript with 'track changes', I wish all my peers were using one of these systems. 

Preparing a manuscript with Emacs, R, knitr, Inkscape and a PDF reader

What is your best time-saving shortcut/life hack?

For biologists, make your research Reproducible Research: 

"Reproducible research involves the careful, annotated preservation of data, analysis code, and associated files, such that statistical procedures, output, and published results can be directly and fully replicated" (from ropensci.org)

This can be a bit overwhelming, as there are a whole ecosystem of tools available, including text editors, programming languages, development tools and version control systems. But the pay-off is immense when it comes to sharing, revising and extending your work.

Other resources:
My brief overview
Software Carpentry
Roger Peng

How do you organize all the stuff you have to do?
I maintain my project outlines and to-do lists with the Emacs extension org mode. The data is stored as human-readable plain text files, but with lots of handy features for sorting and prioritizing tasks, tracking progress and scheduling. I also use it to clock my work on different tasks (inspired by tweets from Rob), to see if that helps keep my effort more focused and deliberate. So far I like it, although it takes a bit of concerted effort to stick with the habit.

Tyler's homemade standing desk

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can't you live without and why?

In the field, my GPS. An important part of field trip prep is loading it up with all the maps and herbarium data I need ready access to.

In the office, I love my standing desk. I've had lots of neck, back and arm issues, and working upright is a big relief.

What do you listen to while you work?
Repetitive, atmospheric stuff. Nothing too melodic or lyrical, it needs to settle into the background. Other than that, I'm pretty eclectic: Persian sufi music, baroque, Arcade Fire. My current geeky pleasure for coding is the Tron soundtrack.

What are you currently reading?
So good they can't ignore you. This is a very contrary approach to building a career. The author argues strongly against the notion that you should follow your passion. His antidote is to build up a set of rare and valuable skills, and use them to carve out a rewarding niche for yourself. It's an interesting read, especially for a scientists considering a career outside academia.

Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?
Introvert

What is your sleep routine like?
Horrible. I don't often get a restful sleep. I'm quite thankful I work in a job where I can set my own hours. Life was simpler when I was a professor -- I was so physically exhausted by the workload that I usually collapsed into sleep at the end of the day!

Tetraploid cranberry blooms

Fill in the blank: I'd love to see ___ answer these same questions.
Andrew Hipp (Morton Arboretum), Sally Otto (University of British Columbia)

What's the best advice you've ever received?
When you feel like you've run up against a brick wall, pause to consider if getting through it is really what you need to do. I get pretty attached to my ideas sometimes, and it can be hard to let go of the bad ones.

Also, not so much advice, but my wife is often responsible for getting me outside in my down time for civilian nature hikes. It's easy to get caught up in the abstract intellectual side of science. But just experiencing nature, unburdened by the need to find a target population and acquire more samples, that's an important way to reinvigorate my work and myself.



Thanks Tyler!

How We Work: Dr. Paul Hurtado

Throughout my travels around academia, I've always been very interested in how other scientists work. Scientists in particular make for a great study of working habits for two main reasons: they typically juggle a variety of tasks and they largely determine their own work schedules. This results in a huge variety of work habits: night owls, early birds, multitaskers, focus-taskers, and on and on.

I've been a long-time reader of Lifehacker's "How I Work" series, an interview format in which folks from various organizations detail the secrets behind their work habits. I've always loved this idea: getting a peak into the habits of someone who's work you admire. As I've read more and more "How I Work" articles, I began to think that this format would work really well for scientists. So, in the same vein as the previous "Get to know a grad student" series, I'm bringing you a series of interviews that showcase how scientists get stuff done. I'm calling it "How We Work". 

A big thanks go to the inspiration for these questions, and to Andy Orin for giving me permission to use them. Go read Lifehacker for more neat stuff.

The first subject for How We Work is Dr. Paul Hurtado. I met Paul through OSU's Evolution and Ecology Club, and have since learned he is our resident statistics guru, birding expert, and all-around smart guy. Paul's work focuses on using mathematical models and computational techniques to answer large-scale biological questions (see his research page). In simple terms, Paul is a statistics wiz that thinks of new ways to analyze tricky data.

Location: Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI), OSU, Columbus, OH

Current Position: It’s complicated. Technically, I’m unemployed, however I just finished a postdoc at OSU in August and I’m currently negotiating a faculty position at a university out west that would start January, 2015. Fortunately my wife has one more year of funding for her postdoc position, which gave me some flexibility in hunting for jobs.

One word that best describes how you work: Inertia. Hard to get started sometimes, and also hard to stop once I get rolling.

Current mobile devices: Galaxy S4 smartphone


Current computer:
1. Desktop: Windows 8.1 (64-bit) 3.1GHz Intel i7 CPU with 8GB RAM.
2. Laptop: An older Dell Latitude D630 with too little storage capacity and speed.
3. I also have access to a multicore linux server through the MBI which I use occasionally.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Because I interact with biologists and mathematicians, I prefer to use free (or widely used) software so that licensing issues and/or software costs don’t get in the way of communicating and sharing content.

1. R is my go-to platform for data visualization, stats and model simulation.

2. I occasionally use R Studio – a front-end for R – but I tend to prefer the multi-window configuration of R and use Notepad++ to edit and run R scripts via NppToR.
3. Matlab is usually my second-in-line computing platform
4. MatCont (a Matlab add-on; although I really need to try Auto or XPP-Auto).
5. Maple and sometimes the free software Maxima for computer algebra (i.e., symbolic manipulation of algebraic expressions instead of crunching numbers)
6. I also use Python, Perl, and C from time to time, so access to a Linux command line is a must.
7. PuTTY and WinSCP for connecting to remote servers via SSH.
8. TeXstudio is my new favorite editor for writing manuscripts and other documents in LaTeX
9. Google Calendar is my primary means of scheduling everything.
10. “To Do” lists help me keep my days organized, so I also use apps like Google Keep (or emails to myself) to jot down important ideas and to organize and schedule tasks.
11. Facebook and Twitter have proven to be useful platforms for “crowdsourcing” technical problems, and soliciting advice or other information from friends and colleagues (Facebook) as well as people I've never met (twitter).
12. I can’t seem to go without Microsoft Office, despite my preference for using free software.
13. The internet, so I guess that means my web browser belongs on this list!

You need big screens to display big data

What is your best time-saving shortcut/life hack?

Talk with the right people, at the right time. Sometimes, I need to spend a lot of time wrapping my head around a problem and thinking it through carefully. But more often than not, I’m stuck on something mundane. In those cases, it can really pay off to just seek out someone with the right expertise who can either point me towards an existing solution, or who can help bounce around ideas until we figure it out. Especially when it comes to doing research, it pays to be selective in how you spend you time.

How do you organize all the stuff you have to do?
I should first admit that I've never considered myself to be a well-organized person, and over the past few years I've been spoiled by the flexible schedule that comes with being a graduate student and postdoc. That said, I have found some nice ways of staying somewhat organized:

1. Simple “To Do” lists – either in a smartphone app, a text file on my desktop, in an email, or written out on some scratch paper next to my computer keyboard – are a primary tool I use to prioritize and schedule most of my day-to-day tasks.

2. Software helps immensely with scheduling. I rely on Google Calendar and a note taking app on my phone to help with scheduling.

3. When I comes to organizing my work, a lot of it takes place on my computer, so I have a simple system of keeping work projects in their own folders, and using cloud-based software (e.g. Box, Dropbox, etc.) to sync content across my laptop and other computers. I incorporate “To Do” lists in code comments, text files and emails, etc. as needed. I’ve tried using version control software like Git to manage code revisions and manuscript drafts, however I’ve abandoned them in favor of just saving copies (with the date appended to the file name) and keeping those in their respective project directories. 

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without and why?

For work, my phone and computer are pretty much all I need! I suppose my coffee mug is the next most essential gadget in my arsenal. Outside of work, however, I am a fairly serious bird watcher (Rob: Paul is probably being modest here. Check out his birding resources page and note that he is one of the top 50 birders in Ohio). I rarely venture outside or do any traveling without bringing along a pair of binoculars. Especially during spring and fall migration! 

The first Kirtland's Warbler in central Ohio. Spotted by Paul in 2011.

What do you listen to while you work?
It depends. My musical interests are pretty broad, so if I want music I’ll just leave Pandora on and let it play from a mix of different channels. But, I can get pretty distracted by music. I’m usually better off with a lot of silence or a lot of ambient noise that won’t draw my attention away. For example, I used to be most effective at getting my math homework done as an undergraduate by bringing it with me to the Biology Club’s weekly bowling night and working on it one or two problems at a time. It was pretty effective, but definitely a compromise between getting my homework done and hanging out with friends.

What are you currently reading?
I've most recently been trying to finish up Writing Science by Schimel, which was the book the Aquatic Ecology Lab chose to read for the summer.

Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?
I’m closer to the extrovert side of the spectrum, but definitely somewhere in the middle.

What is your sleep routine like?
I have a two and a half year old who loves to sneak into bed with us in the middle of the night, so lately my sleep has been pretty variable. I probably average around 8 hours a night but often with at least one interruption during late morning, which takes a toll. Now that I’m a parent, I definitely go to bed earlier (and probably sleep about the same or slightly more on average) although the interruptions definitely take their toll.

I’d love to see _____________ answer these same questions.

Libby Marschall (Ohio State), Liza Comita (Yale), Amy Downing (Ohio Wesleyan)

What’s the best advice you've ever received?
Work hard, play harder.

Get to Know a (Former) Grad Student: Dr. Ana Jimenez

With this post, I'm continuing the "Get to Know a Grad Student" series, an effort to showcase the lives of real scientists. After interviewing a few graduate students, I thought it would be nice to hear from someone who has crossed the PhD boundary into the wild blue yonder. 

Dr. Ana Jimenez is a post-doctoral researcher in Dr. Joe Williams' lab here in the Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology Department at Ohio State. Ana has been my teacher and biggest supporter in the impossible task of getting salamander cells to grow in the lab. She is also my designated dog babysitter, and my dog told me she would rather live with Ana.

She was nice enough to answer the questions below. Enjoy!

"Take me to Ana's"

What kind of research do you do? Please give the scientific version and the non-scientist version.

Scientific-version: My research involves finding linkages between whole animal metabolic rate and cellular metabolic rate. 

For my Ph. D, I looked at the whole animal metabolic cost of hypetrophically growing muscle fibers, and found that larger muscle fibers are metabolically cheaper to maintain for animals, thus, there is a positive selection for animals to grow their muscle fibers as large as they can, until diffusion of important molecules such as oxygen or ATP becomes limiting. 

Figure taken from:
Wiersma et al 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

For my post-doc work, I have been researching how life-history trade-offs in tropical and temperate birds translate down to the cellular level. Tropical birds are said to occupy the “slow pace” of the life-history spectrum, with fewer young and reproduction occurring later in their lives, while temperate birds occupy the “fast pace” of the life-history spectrum, having more offspring and devoting more resources to reproduction early on in their lives. Additionally, we know that, on average, tropical birds have significantly lower whole-animal basal and peak metabolic rate compared with temperate birds. 

So, I have been isolating dermal fibroblasts from phylogenetically-paired tropical and temperate bird species and measuring the cellular metabolic rate of these cells using an XF24 Seahorse analyzer (machine that measures oxygen consumption in a monolayer of cells). I have found that, (lo and behold!), the cellular metabolic rate of the cells isolated from tropical birds have significantly lower basal and peak metabolic rate as well, with differences closely matching those of the whole-animal metabolic measurements. So, cellular metabolic rate does, indeed, retain the whole-animal metabolic signature of the animals the cells were isolated from.


Non-Scientific version: For my doctoral work, I researched why bigger muscle fibers are cheaper to maintain in fish and crustaceans, and for my post-doctoral work, I am researching whether whole animal metabolic rate is retained down to the cellular level in tropical and temperate bird sister species. 

Why is what you study important?

Besides the fact that it is what I love and what I have fun with? Nothing, not important at all…

Just kidding, results from our work with isolated dermal fibroblasts from tropical and temperate birds has let us (with the help of a diabetes researcher at the University of Cincinnati) to propose that cells may have a fixed “metabolic clock” that carefully regulates the whole-animal metabolic rate set-point, a finding that may have important implications in the body weight field. 

Lean and obese people metabolically defend their body weight incredibly precisely, down to the cellular and molecular level. An advantage of our proposed work is that our bird model does not include body weight, and insulin resistance parameters, which, in lean vs. obese studies, is a limitation that confounds the metabolic set-points of obesity. The answer to the question of how an animal decides its metabolic set-point is certain to be the same for bird cells and obesity models. Additionally, this work also has implications for theories of allometric scaling…touchy ground on this one though, so that’s all I’ll say about it.

What was your path to graduate school like?

I was accepted into the master’s program at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW) to work under Dr. Steve Kinsey on muscle physiology and biochemistry of fish and crustaceans. After two years in his lab, I had the choice of defending my master’s thesis and moving on to another lab to do a Ph. D or continuing in his lab for a Ph. D. I really loved my master’s project and I was really, really excited about continuing to answer the questions that it had lead me to, so I chose to stay in the Kinsey lab for my doctorate, a decision I have never regretted.


What do you enjoy doing in your free time? How do you feel about your work-life balance?

I’m told that it is very important to have a work-life balance, but I’m really crappy at keeping said balance. In all of science, there are ebbs and flows of work, so there are times that I barely ever leave the lab, just like there are times I have to find stuff to keep me busy. 

I take advantage of the times that science is slow to spend time volunteering at the humane society or spend time hiking or swimming with my dog. Really, most of my life revolves around animals of one kind or another, and I have fun with all aspects of my life, so it’s sometimes hard to find the fine line between “work” and “life”. My post-doc advisor, Dr. Joe Williams, says “the day I stop having fun will be the day I leave science for good.” I couldn't agree more!

Describe a normal day in your life.

One of the Williams' lab field sites happens to be my house.

I wake up, walk/feed/play with my dog, go for a run (if it’s warm), get ready for work.

Two things can happen for “work:” either we are going out to collect birds, in which case we spend the whole day outdoors, or I’m doing lab work, in which case I spend an incredible amount of time counting cells, plating cells, growing cells, measuring cells’ metabolic rate or cursing at cells for not doing what I wanted them to do…

I also spend an incredible amount of time looking for funding, writing grants, and gathering preliminary data. This part of my life I don’t really like at all, but it is a necessary evil. 

What are your career plans for the future?

I’m highly undecided on my future. I think I will go back to what Joe tells us: The day I stop having fun will be the day I leave science. Right now, I really love what I do and the questions I’m answering, but academia is changing very rapidly, and I’m not sure that I support the changes that are happening.

What has surprised you about graduate school?

I think most of my graduate school experience was as expected. I have to say that the transition between student to post-doctoral researcher was a real eye-opening experience for me. For most of the Ph. D students in my department, no one really spent time discussing with us what happens after you defend you dissertation and you move on. No one told us that there are several different types of post-doctoral positions that you can apply for and that you can shape your future depending on which type of path you pick. No one told us that looking and applying for a post-doc is a full time job and that it should be happening 1.5 years BEFORE you defend. So, I had a hard time with all of that, mainly because I lacked information. Once I successfully landed a post-doc, life went back to meeting my expectations, however.

Student-life and post-doc life hasn't really changed much for me (minus the fact that I went for working with marine critters to working with birds): I work hard a lot of the time, and I have fun with it.

Ana pictured here pipetting without gloves like some sort of rebel.

What do you struggle with the most in graduate school?

I think in graduate school, I struggled the most with independent thinking. It was really tough to think about my own project outside of my advisor’s expectations and frame of mind. 

Now as a post-doc, I have been “left” to independently think since the moment I stepped foot in this lab, and my advisor helps guide my thinking, which has been tremendously helpful. My new struggle is balancing grant-writing time with actually gathering data and writing papers-time. I’m told this struggle does not cease, even after becoming faculty (great news! NOT!)


What has been the best moment of your career so far?

The day I defended my doctorate. By far, most exciting, emotional, and triumphant day of my life.


How do you feel about the dynamic of research, teaching, and outreach in your career and in the future?

In nature, we talk about a balance of resource allocation: if you are investing 60% of your time feeding, you can’t spend 70% of your time mating. 

I feel like the dynamic of research, teaching and outreach follows this model very closely. And I would say that you have to go with your strength: If you are a good, effective communicator and like teaching, spend your resources on that. If teaching the same concepts over and over again bores you and you like the dynamic of research and can be productive at it, then do that. Play to your strengths at all times. If you are good at both, then do 50-50 and find a place that allows you to do that.


Who are your academic role models?

To any animal physiologist, Dr. Knut Schidmt-Nielsen is a God! But more close to home, if I hadn't had the undergraduate research experience I had, I would have never made it to where I am today. So, I’m eternally grateful to Dr. Wayne Bennett from The University of West Florida.


What advice do you have for other aspiring grad students in your field?

Unfortunately, what I would have to say is think twice before coming into academia. But if you love it and your heart is 100% into it, then close your eyes and jump with both feet. Things always work themselves out in the end. Make sure you are having fun, and learning lots.


Thanks Ana!

If you are enjoying this "Get to Know a (Scientist/Grad Student)" series, let me know! 

Feel free to send me some suggestions for what types of scientists you want to learn more about and I promise to track them down and ask nicely. 

SciFund Round 3: Jenn Hellmann

The SciFund challenge, a crowd funding experiment for science, is once again going strong this year. Since this blog started with my own SciFund campaign, it is only fitting that I use it to promote some of the fascinating research done by other students.

This funding cycle, there are three other students in my department at Ohio State who are sharing their science with the world and looking for members of the public to participate with them. One of these students in Jenn Hellman. 

Jenn looking for fish in all the wrong places.

Jenn's research centers around social networks in animals. Particularly, she observes the behavior of African Cichlid fish to better understand the interactions between individuals and groups. Why is this important? These relationships are complex, and the effects of how animals interact in a social network has massive influences on their evolution and ecology. 

Jenn is planning to use donation to fund an expedition to Lake Tanganyika, in East Africa, where she will be able to observe these animals in the wild. 

As part of her campaign, Jenn answered some questions about what she does, why she does it, and what makes her tick:

Tell us about yourself, where you are from, and where you see yourself going.
I'm a second year graduate student at The Ohio State University. I'm originally from Philadelphia, and I did my undergraduate at Messiah College. I took a year off before graduate school to work with kids and to travel, but I came to graduate school last year and I love it. I love being paid to do research and teach, and working in an environment where everyone is here to learn. Because of that, I would love to be able to work as a faculty member at a university eventually. 

Graduate student multitasking at its best.

How did you get involved in your research project?

I came to graduate school knowing that I wanted to do fish behavior, but I didn't know much more than that. I actually got into social networking by reading some of primate literature for a class. The article talked about how certain individuals in the group are responsible for maintaining group stability, and when you remove those individuals, the group gets really aggressive. Later, I was reading some articles about intergroup movement in colonies, and it just struck me that social networking is probably really important in this species too. Since some individuals have many more opportunities to interact with their peers than others, that probably has pretty significant effects on the decisions that they make. 

Why is your research important to you? Why should others fund it?
I think that sociality in general is fascinating and relevant. So many different species, from ants to humans, have evolved extremely complex social systems. Exploring the benefits of social networking can help us compare social systems between species and help us understand why they are so different. Why do ants live in huge colonies with one queen and many helpers, versus fish that cooperatively breed, versus primates that raise their offspring in groups? In all of these types of organisms, their social system is key to their survival and without it, they would not be successful in their environment. 

Exploring social networking is one of the best ways to understand social systems.  It tells us a lot about species: how they find mates, how they maintain social stability, and which individuals are most important in a group. It helps us understand how evolutionary pressures have caused species to adapt a certain way of living, and we can use this information for many things, such as improving conservation plans, anticipating how species will react to disturbances, and tracking the spread of diseases.

Do you have a favorite story that came from working on your research project?

I've had to learn how to SCUBA dive for this trip. The first practice dive that we took as a research group, I was using someone else's equipment and so my BCD (the vest that controls your buoyancy) was too big and the weights around my waist were too heavy. I spent about twenty minutes bobbing up and down between the surface and the bottom of the lake before I got out and fixed it. It was not my best practice dive! 

Why did you decide to particpate in the SciFund Challenge?

The purpose of SciFund is two-fold. First and most importantly, I want people to understand how science applies to their lives. There are all types of research happening that people don't know about and may not care about. I hope that SciFund can at least show people what type of research is out there, and make people interested in it. I think a lot of people see science as this unapproachable and hard-to-understand topic, but it's not if it presented in an understandable way. Second, I want to raise money to help fund my field season to Africa. My research is much more suited for field work than laboratory work (because of space constraints in the lab), but it's expensive to travel to Africa and I need some help!

What was the most difficult aspect of building your SciFund Proposal? What was your favorite? 

The most difficult was definitely the video. I also had to sit outside in 30 degree weather filming without a coat for about an hour, and then couldn't use the footage because of all the background noise. I've never done a video before (ironically, my brother was a film and sound production major), and I'm just lucky that there are programs out there that can help anyone make a movie. The best part was figuring out how to explain my project to the more general population, because it gave me the opportunity to really think about how it is so related to what we see in human society, even though they are 'just' fish. 

Tell us something random. Something funny. Something borrowed. Something blue.

Something random... okay, well a 'Philly cheesesteak' is not actually a Philly cheesesteak unless you are in Philly. You can call it a cheesesteak, but they are definitely not the same and not as good. Anyone from Philly will tell you that!

If you would like to donate to Jenn's SciFund campaign (I did!), go here.

Salamander research featured on The Weekly Wienersmith

  Cool news! I got to talk about our salamander research on this week's episode of Weekly Wienersmith, a really neat podcast about science. You can listen online or download here.

The episode features the work of Dr. Ryan Earley at the University of Alabama. I got to meet Dr. Earley when he came to give a seminar at Ohio State in the winter, and he is one cool scientist. Check out his webpage for some fascinating research on the mangrove rivulus.



Zach and Kelly are super nice and fun to talk to, so go to their webpage and give them some support.

Also, when I talk about folks coming into the field with me to check out the salamanders in the wild, I was serious. Contact me if you are ever interested in tagging along with a scientist in action!