Category: Blog

Transitioning from postdoc to faculty

Posted on by mxc061200 in Blog

One of the most exciting, but stressful times of my life is when I realized that I was “ready” to make the transition from post-doc to faculty. Throughout your career, it is imperative to identify mentors that you can have very open and direct conversations with. Interestingly, other people with a good eye will be able to gauge your preparedness better than you can. I remember sitting down with my 2nd postdoc boss and him identifying that I was ready for a faculty position 2-3 years before I felt ready. I knew I would be ready once I hit a certain level of personal training, as well as feeling confident that I could train and mentor individual’s in my future lab space.

Below are a few tips that worked for me. The list is not exhaustive and I’m sure there are plenty of others.

Tip 1. Know your field of interest and the individuals in it.

Where do you have active collaborators? Where can you grow collaborators? Do you have internal support? How do they see themselves versus the rest of the field? And most importantly, do you fit in?

You will need a scientific identity and what you want your lab to be known for. In order for this to be smoother, have the conversation with your postdoc mentor about what you can/want to take with you from their lab to create your own niche. I hope that this is something you have been building for a while…on the side.

Tip 2. Know the environment where you want to go.

Do you have a desired structure? Do you want to teach undergrads? Do you never want to see undergrads (School of Medicine/Medical Centers)? These environments come with certain pros and cons (mostly salary support for teaching versus grant support). Are you a grant warrior? A teaching aficionado?  

Some of the best advice I received while I was on the market was to have a good understanding of the breakdown of salary types (i.e. soft vs. hard; coming from external funds or internally, respectively), but also duration: 9 month vs. 12 months and how you can make that work for your situation. More research protected time, more pay if you have external money etc.

Tip 3. Know your worth and what your lab needs.

Some more great advice I received was that “everything is negotiable…but not everything is worth negotiating.” Knowing an appropriate salary for the department you are entering is very important for you personally, but it is also important to make sure you have an ideal space for your lab (proximity to subjects, ventilation, temperature, humidity, the view).

Knowing what you want and what your lab needs can sometimes mean you sacrifice something in negotiations. But, in general, where you end up should be your biggest fan and be willing to make things work. Do not be afraid to ask, all they can say is ‘no’, you have already been chosen. Your offer will not be rescinded because you ask for a multi-photon scope.  But they may laugh at you.

Tip 4. Trust yourself!

You will get an inordinate amount of advice. Don’t get caught up feeling like you have to take everyone’s advice. More than likely you will have to make some decisions all on your own. Trust yourself. You make bad ass decisions, that’s why you are there.

Identify personnel as early as possible. People capital is hard to come by and having well trained individuals in the lab as early as possible will set the lab up. You are great at training and as long as you feel someone is trainable, you can hope to mold trainees.

Tip 5. Find a support group.

Keep a network of newly hired/recently hired PIs at different departments/institutions. Communication with others in your position decreases the isolation feeling…AND the feeling that you’re flubbing it all up! Turns out, you are doing the best you can just like everyone else.

There are many new/young PI workshops that bring people together in the same space. There are Slack pages #NewPIslack, and twitter as well. Don’t be afraid nor think it is a waste of time…it isn’t. 

Dr. Michael Burton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He was recently awarded an NIH-Transition-to-Faculty Award. For more information regarding his research, please visit his lab website.

Viral Mediators Can Directly Influence Nociceptors To Produce Pain

Posted on by mxc061200 in Blog

One of the first signs of viral infection is body-wide aches and pain. Although this type of pain usually subsides, at the extreme, viral infections can induce painful neuropathies that can last for decades. Neither of these types of pain sensitization is well understood. A key part of the response to viral infection is production of interferons (IFNs), which then activate their specific receptors (IFNRs) resulting in downstream activation of cellular signaling and a variety of physiological responses. We sought to understand how type I IFNs (IFN-a and IFN-b) might act directly on nociceptors in the dorsal root ganglion (DRG) to cause pain sensitization. We demonstrate that type I IFNRs are expressed in small/medium DRG neurons and that their activation produces neuronal hyper-excitability and mechanical pain in mice. Type I IFNs stimulate JAK/STAT signaling in DRG neurons but this does not apparently result in PKR-eIF2a activation that normally induces an anti-viral response by limiting mRNA translation. Rather, type I IFNs stimulate MNK-mediated eIF4E phosphorylation in DRG neurons to promote pain hypersensitivity. Endogenous release of type I IFNs with the double-stranded RNA mimetic poly(I:C) likewise produces pain hypersensitivity that is blunted in mice lacking MNK-eIF4E signaling. Our findings reveal mechanisms through which type I IFNs cause nociceptor sensitization with implications for understanding how viral infections promote pain and can lead to neuropathies.

Download the full paper Type I Interfons Act Directly on Nociceptors to Produce Pain Sensitization Implications for Viral Infection-Induced Pain.

5 Grant Writing Tips

Posted on by cpn091020 in Blog

By Dr. Greg Dussor and Dr. Ted Price

Being a tenure track faculty member is becoming more and more synonymous with becoming an entrepreneur and the CEO of a small business (your research lab). As such, you become solely responsible for raising funds for the operation of your new small business. However, unlike other entrepreneurial minded citizens that are able to solely focus on running their business, you are expected to perform a variety of other duties, such as, teaching, mentoring, creating social media content (case in point), spinning discoveries into marketable products, serving on university committees, serving as a reviewer for journals and serving on study section. So much serving! By the time you complete your auxiliary duties, you may be asking yourself, what time is left to run my lab and how will I raise money? According to a 2016 Nature survey, finding funding was cited as the biggest challenge for new scientists.

We have written the below five tips that we believe have aided us in crafting better grants and we hope that you find them helpful.

Tip 1 – Propose a project that you are enthusiastic about.

If you don’t like the project, reviewers won’t either. This is a common mistake that we both made in the past and see in study section. You may not think that your writing reflects your lack of enthusiasm, but when compared to other proposals that are written with conviction, the difference can be glaring.

Tip 2 – The aims page is critical.  

Reviewers will often be ready to support the grant (or not) by the end of this page. This tip may seem cavalier, but it is rooted in the realities of the review process and reviewer workload. According to a 2019 report by Grant Review in Focus, “[F]unders spend up to 6-hours per application finding reviewers…and grant reviewers spend on average 10-days per year on reviews”. Time is limited and a written aims page is the grant equivalent of your elevator pitch.

Tip 3 – Ask for feedback from colleagues and take it seriously.

If you are colleagues see holes, reviewers likely will too. We know that everyone is busy, but academicians have tremendous resources available to them in their immediate colleagues. Asking for and seriously considering feedback from them will make you a better grant writer. Likewise, providing feedback to your colleagues will enable you to refine your reviewing capabilities.

Tip 4 – Think about the reviewer.  They are reviewing many other grants. Make their job easy. 

Use 1 figure per page, even if it’s a diagram of the hypothesis or experiment design. A wall of text is boring and intimidating. Including one diagram per page allows the reviewer to see a quick snapshot of the idea or data you are highlighting.

Tip 5 – Don’t propose overly complex experiments or too many of them.

It’s rare for reviewers to say there is not enough work proposed or that experiments are too simple. Traditional wisdom dictates that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” and when proposing experiments it is best to follow this dictum.

Dr. Greg Dussor and Dr. Ted Price have collaborated for the past 20 years. They have submitted countless grants and, in addition to private foundation grants, they are currently funded by five R01’s. Dr. Price teaches a grant writing course at UT Dallas and both Drs. Dussor and Price serve on NIH scientific review groups.

From D1 Football to a PhD Program

Posted on by cpn091020 in Blog

By Eric David, PhD Student

For as long as I can remember, the Texas summer heat indicated the onset of two-a-day’s and the beginning of football season. Practice would begin early, but the morning breeze would quickly end as the August sun rose, and the suffocating heat would expose a divide between those that had prepared for the year and those that ended up in a corner paying for their summer sins in vomit.

Our coaches would blast music over our heads from speakers just a few dozen yards away. This served to deaden our senses, muting the part of our brain telling us to stop. As the days progressed, we transitioned into “full pad” which would only further delineate the weak and the strong. Some days you were the hammer and some days the nail, and when tensions inevitable rose, having eyes in the back of your head was useful. The violence was subtly encouraged and having the ability to push 300lb men into the ground through sheer will and strength was a testament to our training. These were the summers I knew.

Despite never missing a game, in the summer of 2018 I found myself in Lenox Hill hospital in New York City with sepsis and had part of my finger removed due to cellulitis. I was hospitalized and received I.V. antibiotics for an osteomyelitis infection of the hand for over 12 weeks. This happened as I had come off an all-conference season in my third year and was selected as a pre-season all-American. However, I wasn’t allowed to compete until the season was underway, and it seemed all for naught, as we had the worst season in over nine years. Athletes everywhere always face the risk of injury and this is particularly true for football. Furthermore, injury alone isn’t the biggest threat. It is the long-lasting affect, both physically and mentally, of injuries that are most troublesome. In fact, a 2017 study found that D1 athletes participating in a collision sport experienced a lower health related quality of life in their later years than non-injured athletes and non-athletes.[1]

Many of my friends now live with sciatica conditions, improper knee surgeries, brain trauma, and worn down joints. Many of these athletes (including myself) had been playing football since elementary school and have experienced an untold damage that we are only just now understanding. In a 2007 survey of retired NFL athletes, researchers found that nearly half of all respondents (n=1617) reported that difficulty with pain was “very common” or “quite common”.[2] Alarmingly, many of these people also suffered from depressive symptoms and the prevailing theory seems to indicate that depression typically follows from the severity of pain that people experience.

From a player’s perspective we know that each athlete on the field is unique to their assignment and coaches design game strategies on a “mismatch” between two athletes. Differences in height and weight are noted and Newton’s second law of physics cannot be disproven, as the person with the most force produced will win. This results in thousands of chances to be injured and the continual hitting that occurs creates thousands of asymptomatic micro concussions. Over four years of D1 football, I witnessed players have behavioral changes such as irrational anger and deteriorating decision making that are now part of the known symptoms of suffering from micro concussions, except it’s happening decades before it should. These conditions led players into quitting and are no longer continuing a career in sports. In one case, an offensive lineman that had a promising future at the next level was forced to retire from athletics after suffering a bulging disk in his lower spinal column. Sadly, they would not be the only example.

This is an issue not confined to the program I was in, or the sport, but a systemic problem for athletics as a whole. Student-athletes spend hours perfecting a craft, and in doing so wear their joints down, or suffer severe accidents that leave them needing years of physical therapy. A culture of aggression and persecution are simultaneously reinforced, leading to extreme behaviors that leak into our daily life. A 2015 study noted “that the regular hits taken by offensive linemen are leading to more-frequent postimpact symptoms than other positions, but are more frequently left unreported, possibly due to their routine nature”.[3] Often, the “manliness” of football is so ingrained that players were encouraged to play through hits that caused dizziness and other symptomatic conditions of concussion.

Due to these experiences and my familiarity with injury and pain, I have transitioned to a PhD program to pursue my interest in chronic pain research. I now more fully understand how our bodies can deteriorate over time, leading to the release of molecules that cause the chronic pain that we can see in some athletes. My goal is to study the hormonal influences on the pain regulation pathway in the nervous system and contribute to the understanding of how this occurs and how we can help athletes that live with chronic pain, just as my friends and I do today.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4852526/#i1062-6050-51-3-205-b45

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17414796

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4628259

Civic Science Learning Lab – Pain: Communicating the Science without Increasing the Hurt

Posted on by cpn091020 in Blog

The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University and the Rita Allen Foundation recently hosted a webinar about creating a cohesive messaging platform regarding chronic pain. Dr. Ted Price, CAPS director, participated in the webinar.

As Dr. Laura Lindenfield Sher notes, chronic pain “impacts more than 100 million Americans” and the cost of treating it “is estimated to be between 560-635 billion dollars per year”. Tragically, “the suicide rate for chronic pain sufferers is more than double the national average”. Additionally, when it comes to the treatment of chronic pain, there are several imbalances of equity. For instance, “women are treated less aggressively than men” and “black patients are half as likely to receive medications than their white counterparts” even when they exhibit similar symptoms. Clearly, chronic pain is a wide scale issue that requires a deep public commitment to solve.

You can watch the complete webinar at:

The point of painful experiences – at least in squid

Posted on by cpn091020 in Blog

By Candler Paige, PhD student, NIH Blueprint D-Span Awardee

We’re all familiar with the excruciating pain we experience after we hit our elbow on a door frame, and often wish that those annoying experiences never happened, but when discovering new pain drugs one of the biggest concerns facing scientists is making sure that the new medicines can relieve chronic, unnecessary pain without inhibiting acute pain.The acute pain tells us to wake up and alerts us to the hazards of walking sleepily around the Lego battle field that is your living room floor. Although extremely annoying, the short-lived pains we feel every day are protective – these experiences keep us from irreversibly injuring ourselves. There are some people that don’t have this “spidey” sense. People with congenital insensitivity to pain have a genetic mutation that prevents them from feeling any pain at all which causes them to accumulate wounds, burns, broken bones, and they generally have significantly shorter lifespans than those of us that do feel pain. In general, pain protects us from injuring ourselves.

There is one aspect of all types of pain that has eluded scientists: in addition to general discomfort of the pain, people also tend to have an increased sensitivity to their surroundings. Lights are too bright, noises are too loud and this increased sensitivity makes the pain worse. This seems counter-intuitive. Why would your body make painful experiences more wretched than they already are? Scientists have understood the advantage of acute pain for centuries, but the point of the miserable experiences surrounding pain was still not completely understood. For humans to have kept this feature over millions of years of evolution meant that there was some sort of advantage that kept us alive. In 2014 the Walters Lab at The University of Texas Health Science Center decided to explore this problem in squid – an animal often used in exploring evolutionary neuroscience.

In a set of experiments led by Dr. Robyn Crook, it was discovered that pain prevents injured squid from being captured and eaten by their predators. To come to this conclusion uninjured squid were placed in a tank with injured squid along with sea bass – a natural predator. The injured squid had a small cut made on one of their fins without anesthesia. The group observed that the bass were more likely to try to attack the injured squid compared to healthy groups. Then, the injured squid were placed in a tank alone with the sea bass. 50% of the attacks by the bass were successful in capturing the injured squid (when compared to only 25% of the healthy squid being captured). Next, the experimenters anesthetized the squid before the injury – so that they felt no pain after they were injured. Surprisingly, 75% of the squid that were injured but felt no pain were captured and eaten by the bass.

What the group found was the benefit of acute pain immediately following an injury: a defensive response. They showed that pain in injured squid seemed to heighten their defense system – this (somewhat) made up for the injury they had on their fins. The authors summarized their findings:

“Thus, while minor injury increases the risk of predatory attack, it also triggers a sensitized state that promotes enhanced responsiveness to threats, increasing the survival (Darwinian fitness) of injured animals during subsequent predatory encounters.” (Crook et al. 2014)

What these findings demonstrate is the benefit of having increased sensitivity to one’s surroundings while in pain: animals are less likely to be eaten by a predator. This evolutionary advantage was maintained in humans to keep them from being eaten by lions or trampled by buffalo while hunting or stepping on Lego’s night after night.

The next time you have a headache and the noises outside of your window are making you feel even worse – just remember your chances of getting eaten by a bear are even lower than they were before.

Want to learn more? Check out Dr. Price’s lecture on the Evolutionary Advantage of Nociceptor Sensitization.

Sources:
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/congenital-insensitivity-to-pain#genes
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)00335-2