Chemistry

The research talk and proposal talk are arguably the most important parts of the on-site interview. This post, part seven in the “Get a job, Ken! series” delves into both, as well as the final meeting with the department chair. My first piece of advice for those preparing for an on-site interview is to purchase and practice with a slide-advancing remote (a.k.a. a laser pointer or ‘clicker’). I find it tragic when a great scientist appears incompetent because they don't know how to use a borrowed clicker. It’s worthwhile owning a clicker that you know like the back of your hand. In fact, for young graduate students, I recommend investing in a clicker and practicing with it as soon as possible. I am partial to the Logitech Wireless Presenter (The author declares no competing financial interests). The Research Talk Standard seminar talks have one primary goal, to share science. Research talks during an interview have two additional goals. The first is to briefly introduce your area of research and lay a foundation for the concepts and techniques relevant to your proposal talk. This groundwork will allow for extra time during the proposal talk (vida infra) to discuss your ideas. Of course, it's important to seek a balance since not everyone who attends your proposal talk will be at the research talk, and vice versa. The second goal of the research talk is to demonstrate your teaching skills. The presentation will be open to all faculty and students—basically any involved in the hiring decision—and they’ll be asking themselves: How engaging and eloquent is this applicant? How well does he or she explain new concepts? What kind of teaching methods do they use (analogies, examples, images, etc.)? How good is she or he at answering questions? I have seen way too many talks that care more about demonstrating “I’m smart!” than actually communicating ideas. In these “I am so smart” presentations only two or three audience members have the expertise necessary to follow along past the first few slides. Please be assured that the audience already knows you’re smart, competent, and can publish complex ideas in top-tier, peer reviewed journals. They want to know if you’re also able to share your ideas with non-experts (i.e. students). The research talk will generally be scheduled for one hour, which will include a short introduction and a ten minute question and answer session at the end. I made sure to avoid 1) going over the allotted time because it can imply time management issues or 2) finishing the presentation in under 30 minutes, which might  suggest a lack of content/results. I did my best to aim for a 40-50 minute presentation. Most audience members will not mind if they get to leave a little early. Also, presenters usually have about 15 minutes to prepare before the talk. But be forewarned that when earlier meetings run long, you’ll have to jump into the presentation without any prep time. Proposal Talk The job interview proposal talk is a lot like a graduate student proposal talk (also sometimes known as a qualifying exam) but with a slightly different focus. The primary focus of a qualifying exam is to defend your ideas.  In addition to defending your ideas during the job proposal talk, you’re expected to provide tangible ways of pursuing the ideas and mentoring young researchers along the way. Similar to the written proposal, the general outline for most proposal talks is 1) introduce a problem that needs to be solved, 2) mention how others are trying to solve it, 3) introduce how you are trying to solve it, and 4) discuss why your method is better and 5) mention the possible implications of your work. I started my proposal talk with an outline slide. While everyone was getting situated they were able to view the slide and familiarize themselves with my flavor of research. Below is an outline slide example: Not all audience members will have read your proposals or attended the previous research talk, so you’ll also w

Structural Biology: Sulfonamide drugs may harm nervous systems by inhibiting an enzyme

Interesting way to depict micelles.

CAUTION! BAD TOC GRAPHIC DO NOT READ!

Environment: Under current U.S. environmental and health regulations, federal agencies could miss identifying risks associated with new nanomaterials

In the previous post (http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/05/23/sepublica-how-semantics-can-empower-us-scholrev-scholpub-btpdf2/) I outlined some of the reasons why semantics are so important. Here I want to show what we have to do (and again stick with me – although you might disagree with my stance). The absolute essentials are: We have to be a community. We have to identify things that can be described and on which we are prepared to agree. We have to describe them We have to name them We have to be able to find them (addressing) Here Lewis Carroll, a master of semantics shows the basics And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. `They must go by the carrier,’ she thought; `and how funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s own feet! And how odd the directions will look! ALICE’S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ. HEARTHRUG, NEAR THE FENDER, (WITH ALICE’S LOVE).  Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!’ Alice identifies her foot as a foot, and makes gives it a unique identifier RIGHT FOOT. The address consists of another unique identifier (HEARTHRUG) and annotates it (NEAR THE FENDER). There’s something fundamental about this – (How many children have annotated their books with “Jane Doe, 123 Some Road, This Town, That City, Country, Continent, Earth, Solar System, Universe?). Hierarchies seem fundamental to humans. Anything else is much more difficult. (Peter Buneman and I have been bouncing this idea about). I am sure we have to use hierarchies to promote these ideas to newcomers. Things get unique identifiers. They can be at different levels. Single instances such as Alice’s left foot. But there are also whole classes – the class of left feet. I have a left foot. It’s distinct from Alice’s. And we need unique names for these classes, such as “left foot“. Generally all humans have one (but see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_with_Two_Left_Feet ). And we can start making rules, see http://human-phenotype-ontology.org/contao/index.php/hpo_docu.html. At the moment, all relationships in the Human Phenotype Ontology are is_a relationships,  i.e.  a simple class-subclass relationships. For instance, Abnormality of the feet is_a Abnormality of the lower limbs. The relationships are transitive, meaning that they are inherited up all paths to the root. For instance, Abnormality of the lower limbs is_a Abnormality of the extremities, and thus Abnormality of the feet also is Abnormality of the extremities. We see a terminology appearing. Some would call this an ontology, others would refute this. I tend to use the concept of “dictionary” fuzzed across language and computability. This is where the difficulties start. One the one hand this is very valuable – if a disease affects the extremities, then it might affect the left foot. But it’s also where people’s eyes glaze over. Ontology language is formal and does not come naturally to many of us. And when it’s applied like a syllogism: All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal Many people think – so what? – we knew that already. On the other hand it’s quite difficult to translate this into machine language (even after realising that “men” is mans (the plural). The symbology is frightening (with upside down A’s and backwards E’s). Here are fundamental concepts in a type system: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12532552/what-part-of-milner-hindley-do-you-not-understand : The discussion on Stack Overflow includes: “Actually, HM is surprisingly simple–far simpler than I thought it would be. That’s one of the reasons it’s so magical” “The 6 rules are very easy. Var rule is rather trivial rule – it says that if type for identifier is already present in your type environment, then to infer

--> Uncanny resemblance: Side-by-side comparison of the U.S. national symbol and Arsenal soccer manager Arsene Wenger. Credit: Bald Eagles That Look Like Arsene Wenger/Tumblr Silly samplings from this week’s science news, compiled by Sophia Cai and Jeff Huber. --> Website dares to ask the question millions of Premier League fans have wondered for years: Is the manager of Arsenal's soccer team a bald eagle? [Grantland] Don’t go chopping off your fingers for kicks just yet, but we’re one step closer to regenerating body parts like salamanders can. [iO9] Drug-resistant tuberculosis has finally met its match, scientists say. It’s a powerful, expensive, and rare supplement called … vitamin C. [BBC] Rubbing dirt in wounds can ward off infections. Boy Scouts everywhere rejoice that getting a first aid merit badge just got a whole lot easier. [Popular Science] Would you rather lose $1,000 or gain 20 lb? Turns out, people will pay a pretty penny to keep a pretty figure. [USA Today] NASA puts a new spin on Friday night pizza – no need to order takeout, just print it out. [Huffington Post] Forget worrying about the war on robots, and start worrying about the super-Einsteins and super-MacGyvers next door. [iO9] Amphibians are disappearing at a surprising rate in the U.S. Wait a minute, when was the last time I saw the Warner Bros. frog? [Baltimore Sun] Related Posts:Amusing New AliquotsAmusing News AliquotsIn Print: ACS Member Finds Success On…Amusing News AliquotsIn Print: Shall We Play A Game?

Put this one in the category of "reactions you probably wouldn't have thought of". There's a new paper in Organic Letters on cleaving a carbon-carbon triple bond, yielding the two halves as their own separate nitriles. It seems to be a reasonable reaction, and someone may well find a use for it. I just enjoyed it because it was totally outside the way that I think about breaking and forming bonds. And it makes me wonder about the reverse: will someone find a way to take two nitriles and turn them into a linked alkyne? Formally, that gives off nitrogen, so you'd think that there would be some way to make it happen. . .

Mary Beth Mulcahy is a Ph.D. chemist and a Chemical Safety Board investigator. She was kind enough to offer me some of her time for an e-mail interview. What follows is an e-mail interview; it has been formatted for the blog and is basically unedited.Can you tell us a little about your background? Dr. Mulcahy: Public school education mixed with a paper route, fast food jobs, and Science Olympiad in high school eventually led me to a major in chemistry at a private liberal arts school called Colorado College in Colorado Springs. By a chance meeting with someone at a party the last month of my senior year in college, I landed a high school teaching job in a small mountain town that eventually lead me to a teaching job in New York City. After three years of teaching, I went back to tackle a PhD in physical chemistry at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The National Science Foundation provided the funding for a post-doc in Bariloche, Argentina at the Centro Atómico. After returning from my post-doc, I taught high school again for one year before working for a biotech company and then ultimately the CSB.How did you end up working at CSB? Dr. Mulcahy: When I started graduate school at 25 I suppose I thought I would get a PhD and be a professor, but somewhere along the way I realized that I did not want that career path. When I came back from my post-doc, I took a job at the high school where my husband was teaching because they really needed someone and I thought it would be fun to teach again. If anyone out there ever forgets why they got into science in the first place, I highly recommend he or she get a part-time job teaching high school science and then spend the entire year doing interesting demos and experiments with the students that get at real-life problems. (I say part-time because teaching is an incredibly time-consuming job and I do not think one could get the full enjoyment from it if he or she had a full teaching load.)While I thoroughly enjoy teaching and definitely see myself doing it again toward the end of my career, I really wanted to see what I could do with a PhD. I took full advantage of ACS's help for the unemployed chemist and attended a national meeting for free (I think ACS still lets unemployed members attend for free) where I listened to a seminar on how to use the web to find a job (this was an amazing seminar put on by someone from Google I believe), participated in a kind of speed-dating type round table session to get exposure to other career options for a chemist, and communicated with a mentor that the ACS connected me to. Then, I started searching for a job using two methods I repeatedly read would not work--I cold called companies and answered Craigslist job posts. I was able to secure three interviews and two jobs using the methods.I originally saw a CSB job posted on Craigslist and the description intrigued me. The CSB at that point was clearly looking for a chemical engineer who had worked in a chemical plant or refinery, but the CSB was also looking for interns. Never one to pass up an interesting opportunity, I applied for the internship and ultimately obtained the position almost a full year after I originally applied. So that year I believe the CSB had two 22 year-old interns, one 23 year-old intern, and me who was over thirty and had a PhD. Still amuses me to think that is how I got here.What do you do from day-to-day at CSB? Dr. Mulcahy: To explain what I do day-to-day I need to give a little background on what the Chemical Safety Board does. At the CSB we conduct root cause investigations of chemical accidents. At first glance, you might think a root cause would be technical in nature such as identifying the corrosion mechanism that lead to the failure of a pipe or storage vessel. More often than not, the corrosion mechanism (or hazard) is well known and awareness of its existence was not enough to preclude the accident. As a result, we focus on finding a correctable failure in the