Who gets NIH grants and is it a problem?

Drugmonkey posts a graph from Grantome.org showing distribution of grants by institution. A series of follow-up posts at Grantome includes one that looks beyond the top 50 institutions and concludes: The NIH website reports that more than 80% of its budget goes to over 2,500 universities and research institutions. Yet for the R01 – which is arguably […]

Human subjects and education research

At Retraction Watch, there’s a story of a paper about ethics training retracted due to IRB human subjects protocol problems. We tend to think of human subjects research as involving things like drug trials, but a lot of it is things like this: This was an IRB-approved paper-pencil study investigating how certain features of ethics […]

Can we make Science more family-friendly?

A couple of weeks ago, Jon Eisen tweeted a link to an article in the Atlantic: For Female Scientists, There’s No Good Time to Have Children Over the past decade these issues have come to the attention of universities in the United States and abroad. Many sensible policies have been introduced in an attempt to make […]

WP PubMed Reflist

One of the reasons I started my old blog was to use it as a front end for managing our department website.  Prospective graduate students generally don’t think my friends at MIT haven’t published for the last 5 years based on their website, but people with bicoastal biases might actually believe that about Texas A&M. […]

Tenure surprises

Via Jonathan (@phylogenomics) Eisen on Twitter: The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article on fear and loathing among the untenured. Overall, the content is good, common sense stuff: mentor your junior faculty, hire with the expectation of promotion, give frequent feedback, don’t discourage creative teaching by overemphasizing numerical student reviews.  What led me to […]