Funding or Firing!

Scientific research has entered the age of "get funded or get fired." Since my position depends on "soft-money" (which means I'm supposed to fund 90% of my salary in grants) my job is in jeopardy. While this isn't a fun place to be, I have always known the risks and possibility of this happening. That's life—if you want to have fun and do science, you accept the risk that your nation will choose to expend its resources on senseless conflict and drain the pool of cash for research and development. :-) I guess you can see where my biases might lie.

So, much like my last post, I'm working very hard as often as possible. The summer is always very busy with students populating the lab and, my chief tech moved on to another lab this past summer. Very hairy time. Nonetheless, I have been in the lab far more lately than in the past five years or so and that's been fun for me (maybe less so for the students!) as I have been revamping my laboratory's focus and working to make the lab a leaner/meaner, agile tool.

I have continued to refine my workflow issues and have become far better at managing my time than in years past. I am still relying on a mix of emacs org-mode for a master priority list and paper calendar sheets for daily tasking (stuck into the back of my lab notebook). This seems to work well and keeps me very organized. I have done very little manuscript writing this summer but I have been reviewing papers from a bunch of different journals on an almost weekly basis. Unfortunately, due to the volume, I am often late getting my comments back to the editor and that's an ongoing source of frustration (for me as much as for them!). I've cut back on the number of papers that I am willing to review but that has been balanced by the increase in requests. Frankly, if a paper is within my areas of expertise, I usually say `yes' and I find that I learn a lot about current state-of-the-art in my field. It seems to me that I exist in an interesting niche with expertise in Physiology/Neurophysiology, developmental Neuroscience, and computational modeling.

In other news I've been learning R as I can't afford to pay staff statisticians a whole bunch of money to build statistical models for me. Nargh. Luckily, we have a class through Epidemiology and Biostatistics on R programming so I'm muddling through. The class is taking a HUGE chunk of my time but this is good for me and I find it interesting and very useful—potentially. Also, there's a great add-on for emacs called ess which stands for "emacs speaks statistics" and this has been a life-saver. I can run R within an emacs window and have all the editingfeatures and syntax highlighting that I know and love available.

I suppose that's all for now. I realize this has been a long gap but I have been extremely busy and, even now, I'm avoiding programming homework to post. LOL!