Have you ever minimized your Facebook browser window when your supervisor walked past your desk, afraid you might appear unprofessional? Social-networking guilt may soon be a thing of the past as a new breed of social networking sites for scientists clamor to be the next great timesaver in the lab–for you and your supervisor. These science-specific, Web-based networks combine handy library and document-sharing tools with a social twist. Such sites permit scientists to “help out each other with protocols, discuss topics, prepare for scientific meetings, maybe even show off your research a little bit,” says social network user Erika Gyengesi, a neuroscience postdoc at Yale University.
Category Archives: Features
Transferring Skills to Tech Transfer
Dermot Leonard’s first experience with technology transfer was as a mechanical and manufacturing engineering student in 2002. He and his teammates at Queen’s University in Belfast, U.K., won £10,000 in a Northern Ireland Science Park competitionfor their business plan to develop and market a self-powered medical pump. The invention never made it to market, Leonard says: The team took a half-hearted stab at marketing their idea–but then they graduated. They spent the rest of the money paying off student loans.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Cool Off, Revise, and Submit Again
The sting of rejection was just as sharp the fourth time around for Marcus Bischoff, a postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge , U.K. “There’s a lot of disappointment,” he says, when your manuscript gets rejected by a journal. After a year of trying, he was both relieved and pleased when the fifth journal–a “good journal,” he says–accepted his paper.
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Geoscientists in High Demand in the Oil Industry
Six years ago, would-be lawyer Kira Diaz-Tushman heard a National Public Radio program about the impending retirement of senior U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) geologists. “I thought, ‘That sounds fun. I want to do what they’re doing and play around in the field.’ ” So she double-majored in geology and political science at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and did a summer internship at USGS.
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