Author Archives: Joan E. Strassmann
An easy productivity tip: don’t stop at a stopping place
You know the feeling. Four ideas are juggling in your brain and you need to get them down on paper. They shift around as you struggle for the best order, put in transitions, and write your paragraphs. After all, you … Continue reading
Please join the American Association for the Advancement of Science for secret reason in addition to the main one
Congratulations to all the new fellows of AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science! Those from Wash U were honored with nice write-ups in the Wash U Record. Here is a list of all of them. It is … Continue reading
In on-line teaching one thing is essential
Of all the preparations with Canvas and Zoom, in all the discussions with my Teaching Assistants, in reading the blizzard of emails my anxious university sends out, there is one thing I keep remembering from my son’s long experience with … Continue reading
Why we fail at hiring Black faculty in biology departments
Today was a day of reflection. How have we gotten to this sorry point in the history of the US? What have I personally contributed to the problem? What have I personally contributed to the solution? How can we do … Continue reading
Fishy pasta sauce
We are fortunate to be sheltering in place with an old friend and Clark Way Harrison visiting professor from Italy, so instead of adding to the excellent advice about Zoom and other tricks of distance teaching, I will be sharing … Continue reading
Best updates on the new corona virus (#coronavirus, #covid19, #SARSCoV2) are on Twitter: a brief tutorial
Want to see a phylogeny of #covid-19? Follow @nextstrain. Want to hear what a Harvard epidemiologist thinks? Follow @mlipsitch. Want a thoughtful microbiologist’s perspective? Follow @RELenski. What to know the latest advice from the World Health Organization? Follow @WHO. Want … Continue reading
One important way to be fair in grad school interviews
Today is the day! We are interviewing possible graduate students! They have made a huge cut and have been invited to campus. Which ones will we commit to for 5 or more years? Which ones will join our labs, have … Continue reading
The ethical treatment of data: six essentials
Science is founded on a lovely relationship between theory and data. Theory predicts patterns. Data tells us which theories work. Together they make sense of our world. How do we teach students to handle data properly? Six general areas come … Continue reading
Trust your collaborators?
How many wasps are on this nest? What are their unique identifying marks? How many eggs, larvae, and pupae are in the nest? How many times does a given wasp dominate another? These are the questions that gave the numbers … Continue reading
A tragedy in animal behavior and heroic responses
As I write this 8 papers where data were collected by Jonathan Pruitt are somewhere in the pipeline for retraction and another 5 have been identified with data problems. Many others are being checked. Yet other papers, mostly with data … Continue reading
Sociobiology 