Cameron Hummels in his observatory, 2009. Photo: Lucas Laursen.
The telescope room atop Pupin Hall at Columbia University offers a stunning view of the night sky and the New York City skyline. Astronomy Ph.D. candidate Cameron Hummels even considered moving his desk and computer up to the rooftop shed before concluding that his computer would not last long without heat or air conditioning. As much as Hummels would like to be near the telescopes all the time, the discoveries he wants to make also require computers, and there’s a lot at stake: “I love the fact that I could potentially make a difference,” he says, “in how we identify the underlying principles of nature.”
Sarah Addou stared hard at her computer screen, willing the code in front of her to compile properly. “When you don’t have any experience writing code, it’s a steep learning curve,” she recalls today, 8 years after that summer internship experience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York state.
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.
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.
