Academics and starting a family later, if at all

I was a graduate student for 5+ years.  Most of my friends are graduate students and have been for at least 3+ years.  Also, almost all of my good friends who are also currently graduate students are male.  And today, because of this, I came to an amazing revelation:

In one week, I will be going to my first baby shower.  In two and a half weeks, I will turn 29.  I made it to almost 29 without attending a single baby shower.

I may be highly educated, but I have almost NO idea what to do here. (picture from babygearworld.com)

We can back up and analyze this six ways from Sunday.  A large part of it is that I just do not have that many close friends who have had children.  And a large part of THAT is because my close friends are eternally in school and not financially ready for kids.  And going deeper into the rabbit-hole, a large part of THAT is that my friends are largely male.  Venn diagram, anyone?  Let's be safe and assume U.S. friends only.

Pardonnez pour le Open Office illustration.

My female friends are not less-educated.  I just have less of them (and that's what I'm trying to illustrate).  I would say that by and large, people who are graduate-level educated make up the majority of my friend base.  Because I am in a STEM field, and so are many of my friends, the population of males is just going to be larger.

There have been many, many science bloggers that have exhaustively discussed the prevalence of children in Ph.D.-parent relationships, the average age of Ph.D.-parents at first child, the dearth of women in tenure-track professor jobs because of the difficulties (or not?) of balancing work/life, or because of the general environment, etc.  The general trends are what you would expect: those with more education wait to have children and typically have fewer children than those who are less-educated.

But hold on.  Then there is something else.  The average age for EVERYONE (highly educated or not) having children is increasing.  So perhaps I, at almost 29, and my friends, who are typically younger than I am, just haven't hit the baby boom yet, and those blue circles will increase in size as time goes on.

And here I sit making graphs and analyzing instead of thinking of how to prepare/shop for a baby gift.  In light of the above graphs, it's not too surprising, eh?

Dredging up the French, part 2 (turbo mode!)

Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrive!

I talked about how my French is coming back to me a year ago, but since then, it's been on the accelerated path.  On the one hand, I've got a province where French isn't REALLY spoken a lot, but you can definitely find it.  On the second hand, I've got the boyfriend who was in Ontario French immersion school (and his father and sister will banter back and forth with him on occasion).  And on the third hand, and likely the most prevalent in my everyday life, we've got our new Quebecois postdoc and new Iranian postdoc, who both speak French.  They speak French to each other and to anyone else who admits they know a bit of French and would be willing to speak it occasionally.  The Ontario-native grad students and I are included.  It's super cool.

That's three hands of French, people.  French is launching a triple-pronged and multi-accented attack at me.  It sounds dumb of me to say "I know it's an official language and all, but I didn't know it would be so prominent," but that's kind of how I felt moving to Ontario, land of English-speakers.

I find myself falling into the trap that I always do with all of the (bits and shreds of) foreign languages I know.  People talk to me in the foreign language.  I understand, but knee-jerk answer in English.  My comprehension is solid and immediate, but so desiring am I to convey information back quickly, that I answer in the most expedient way possible.  I have to convince the postdocs to stop letting me do this.

Has anyone else moved to Ontario and noticed an unusual influx of French into their life?

Retraction Watch

Insert a mind-numbingly and excuse-laden list of reasons why I haven't posted.  There are many reasons.  Let's just chalk it up to a) being busy, and b) mental stress.

However, I have something fantastic that is above and beyond worth its own post.  In fact, it's worth its own blog.  And that's where there is a blog dedicated to it.

Retraction Watch is a wonderful blog run by science writers Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus and chronicles various and sundry recent retractions from scientific journals.  I find this blog and its content so important that it gets a special place in my RSS feed right alongside the journals I follow.  And believe me.... follow it, I do.  Some retractions are relatively harmless, and while not completely excusable, they are forgiveable.  Then, however, there are the retractions that involve doctoring of images, cutting/pasting of photos or text, and downright irreproducibility of data.  These lead to, likely, more retractions, and then firings (Zhiguo Wang), and then possible stripping (Bengu Sezen) of Ph.D.s (Diederik Stapel).

Friends, I'm scared of getting scooped just as much as the next guy.  However, I'm even more scared of scientific fraud.  This makes me want to do things right in order to avoid having my name associated with retracted work.  I imagine that after you retract (or your work is retracted FOR you), you feel much like this:

Found guilty of scientific misconduct?  This will be a statue-y, nude version of you afterwards.

Career over, job prospects ruined, scientific cross to bear?  It sounds awfully threatening and also awfully scary.  I really don't fancy that being me.  I think I and many other budding scientists can greatly learn from the stories of the falls from grace that other researchers have taken.

Really.  Go check out Retraction Watch if you haven't yet.

Small is beautiful!

I know, I haven't posted on here in a while. That's because life happened, aka my social life exploded. I'm no less in the lab, but I am less at home and contemplating blogging.

Still, I can't help but write about this topic. A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege to hear Paul Weiss, the director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA, give an ACS webinar entitled "Small Is Beautiful." Paul and I overlapped at Penn State before he made the move to California, and he is a very insightful and brilliant person whose mind is always thinking about the next big thing. "Small Is Beautiful" was about the role of nanoparticles and nanoscience in present and future technologies. There were numerous questions that went unanswered in the interest of time, and it just goes to show how much the public doesn't know about the nanoworld.

Then again, there is so much that nano researchers don't know about the nanoworld. We are just scratching the surface with studies of nanoparticle toxicity and nanoengineered electronics.  There is also the (large, looming) question of how we can control nanoparticle assembly and direct them to where we want.  So far, this has been explored by linking with DNA or electrical fields/electrofluidics, or just plain letting intermolecular forces do the work (references for all of these available on request), but it remains a very important field of study.  One thing that we can glean from these findings: locating and directly positioning a single nanoparticle?  Not so easy.

I, for one, miss working with nanoparticles. I used to work with nanowires that weren't exactly nano-sized:

I didn't take this picture, but it's a scanning electron microscope picture from our group.  Obtained from science.psu.edu.

Now I work with nanostructured microelectrodes.  Essentially, the structural size scale is the same, but now I'm dealing with things that aren't free-floating in solution.  The nanowires were electroplated on a solid scaffold, then released.  The microelectrodes are electroplated on a solid scaffold.... and that's it.  They have their advantages (namely, their ability to interface with electronics), but I miss the quicker reactivity imbued by free-floating particles.... not to mention the larger amount of redundancy.  I used to be able to make 1 billion nanowires at a time, whereas I can only make 20 microelectrodes now.

There is a certain allure of nanoparticles, especially when they're all colorful and pretty and they produce transmission electron micrographs that look like this:

From the Hamad-Schifferli group at MIT.  Image from MIT News.

Those are gold nanoparticles of varying shapes and sizes, and their colors change based on the shape and size of the particles.  Definitely possible optics applications there, as unlike dyes, nanoparticles don't photobleach or break down under light exposure.

I suppose I'm somewhat rambling, but my point is that small is indeed beautiful, and there is a lot about nanotechnology that needs to be investigated.  Being a nanoscientist is fun, because I never know what I'll get to look at under the electron microscope next!

Separating people from their science

On a daily basis, graduate students and other researchers get figuratively beaten down by experiments that don't work, and they take it personally.  This can lead to depression, an unpleasant work environment, and even a poisonous aversion to science that can spread all too easily to others as they fall into the same trap.  We all get a little self-deprecating when we run into a spate of bad laboratorical luck, but when do we cross the fine line of failures in the lab extending to our views of our self-worth?

Back in the day, I heard about a professor who had some dubious dealings, and being a young scientist, this shook me down to the core.  I recall the poignant memory of feeling physically ill and shutting myself away for a few hours after hearing the news.  I remember calling my parents while taking a walk to clear my head, and my mom telling me, "Krissy, if you're going to be in this business, you've got to learn to separate people from their science.  They're people, too, and they make mistakes just like everyone else."

This advice from my mom, who is quite the scientist herself, was some of the best I have ever received, and it came at the perfect time (i.e., early).  Since then, I have encountered professors, researchers, and colleagues that  might choose different paths than I would in life, but I don't associate our disagreements with their science.  Their science and work is independent of and not influenced by their personal decisions (hopefully).  More, I don't tie in failed experiments with my self-worth.  If it didn't work, I 1) still try to salvage some knowledge out of it (a subject for another post, for sure), and 2) dust myself off and start another day.  It's amazing the insight a good night's sleep can provide.

This advice might be why I only had very minimal inklings of imposter syndrome just at the beginning of my graduate career (i.e., feeling like you don't belong or are not good enough for a certain professional setting), or why I have no problems talking to famous professors on a casual level.  I also have no qualms calling professors by their first name if they ask me to; I know a surprising number of people who struggle with this.  They are just people, and they are just as fallible as I am.

On the flip side, I am relatively disinclined to throw my proverbial professional weight around.  "Doctor" is reserved for formal introductions and solicitations of my money from my previous academic institutions.  I believe making myself approachable facilitates discussion and promotes teamwork.  Looking around at my environments past and present, this seems to be the direction that this new generation of science is taking, and I have to say, I'm liking it.