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Category Archives: Research
Do your undergrads actually understand their summer research project?
All over the country, undergraduates are embarking on research projects. They are banding birds, squeezing ticks for parasites, culturing bacteria, seining streams, cutting open mice, and many other things. If you ask them what they are doing, they will be … Continue reading
Posted in Research, Undergraduates, Your lab group
Tagged NSF, REU, scientific method, undergraduate research
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You want to do research but how do you begin?
Dare I say every undergraduate should find a research home on campus? After all, don’t you want to learn at a deeper level how all the knowledge you learn in your classes is discovered? Don’t you want to go from … Continue reading
Posted in Recommendations, Research, Uncategorized, Undergraduates
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Can you answer this crucial scientific question?
“Where did you see that,” may not seem like the most crucial question, but for natural science, history, geography, archaeology, and many other fields, provenance is crucial information. The volunteers that keep eBird useful will challenge you if you claim … Continue reading
Posted in Communication, Field work, Research
Tagged accuracy, data, history, location, provenance, sampling
2 Comments
Secret tricks: Never ever pay for access to a scientific article!
It is a cold shock to see a request for money for a scientific article. I just saw one for $35.95 for a paper I actually wrote! Now why would I pay for a paper I published in 2014? I … Continue reading
Posted in Public Communication, Research
6 Comments
Teach statistics the same way you teach baking a chocolate cake
We have wonderful undergraduates and we are failing them. We are failing in something important and I plan to fix it. That we are failing became very clear to me this past spring at their poster presentations. Generally the posters … Continue reading
What are you paying your work-study students?
This is the time of year when we begin to think about our classes, the fall excitement, and a crop of new students coming through our doors. Many of those will qualify for work study. This is a federal program … Continue reading
Posted in Research, Undergraduates, Your lab group
Tagged fairness, minimum wage, Research, undergraduates, work study
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Recipe for studying symbiosis
What do scientists who identify first as symbiontologists study? OK, maybe I invented that term, but something brings hundreds of people to meetings where the only thing they have in common is that they study symbiosis. What do sponges, … Continue reading
Posted in Research, Scientific meetings, Scientific societies
Tagged creativity, GRC, Lisbon, research questions, Symbiosis
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Giddy with the success of our undergrads and their posters
Today our six research undergraduates, Kai, Alicia, Libby, Stephanie, Olivia, and Daniela, presented their research on posters at the Fall Undergraduate Poster Session, scheduled to fall on parent’s weekend. We began planning at the beginning of the semester how they … Continue reading
Posted in Posters, Research, Teaching, The joy of teaching, Undergraduates
Tagged meetings, posters, Research, Undergrads, undergraduates
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The trouble with paradigm shifts
We biologists know well the popular version of Thomas Kuhn‘s famous work, The structure of scientific revolutions, and we all want to shift paradigms in our research. This has serious negative consequences. Let me explain. Kuhn in his famous, paradigm … Continue reading
Posted in Creativity, New ideas, Research
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How to motivate a graduate student
When you are motivated, ideas bubble up in the middle of any activity. When you are motivated, you find solutions and links across different areas of your endeavor. When you are motivated, you find joy that carries you through the … Continue reading
Posted in Graduate school, Research
Tagged butterflies, Graduate school, independence, joy, learning Ph.D., motivation, undergraduates
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Sociobiology 