Dr Becca, PhD 🐘
@doc_becca
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dry shampoo convert | cocktail enthusiast | neuroscience PI | SABV influencer | urban gardener | drum learner | she/her @docbecca .bsky.social
Joined April 2009
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How many times does this have to be said?
Women/girls don’t need encouragement to pursue careers in science. They need not to be forced out by systemic biases and policies that promote men’s success over women's.
Can all-girls STEM camps be part of the answer to encourage more women to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math careers? The latest from
@ScienceInsider
explores the effectiveness of such camps for promoting and supporting
#womeninSTEM
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1. Was denied tenure
2. Said “I disagree.”
3. Was awarded tenure.
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Almost exactly 6 years ago, I learned that my Dean rejected my tenure case. I appealed and won. Today I learned the (new) Dean just approved my promotion to Full. My brain is having a moment.
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THE PROVOST REVERSED HIS DECISION AND IS RECOMMENDING ME FOR TENURE
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After 8 years of applying, a negative tenure decision because I didn't have one, appealing my tenure decision and winning, and a bunch more applying....I GOT AN R01!!!!
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A plea to my rodent lab colleagues: make it a point to teach your trainees to say “sex,” not “gender” when talking about animal research.
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A scientists’ march on DC is already in the works! Looks like early stages but watch & follow
@ScienceMarchDC
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My rule for rejections is that I get one day to sulk/eat/shop/drink etc, no questions asked. Then the next day it’s back to work. I think giving yourself permission to indulge in your feelings fully (but on a limited time scale) is important and healthy.
Why do grant rejection completely knock the productivity out of me? Now I just want to go to the whiskey bar to drink & eat.
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OK I need to rant a little (thread).
The belief that if you study female animals you MUST take hormones into account is SEXIST.
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11%ile!!!!!!
This has to get funded if I’m NI, right? I have been trying for an R01 for EIGHT FUCKING YEARS
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“The gender gap in winning grants is about 7 percent.”
“Young male PIs were found to be just as sexist as their older male peers.”
This essay has ALL the receipts you need when someone says there’s no sexism in STEM anymore.
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The myth that girls & women just don’t “like" science is part of the problem and works against the purported goal of gender balance in scientific careers.
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I must say, a twitter-based Munchausen-by-proxy conspiracy was not on my 2020 bingo card.
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Just sent final versions of my new R01 proposal to our grants admin. That means it is now time for….
THE CLOSING OF THE TABS
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If you will forgive me a little non-humble bragging: my student evals this semester for my 70 person upper-level lecture class (taught via zoom) were AMAZING. I thought a thread on what they really seemed to appreciate migh be of use to folks teaching online in the spring. 1/n
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Unanimous vote from my dept for promotion to Full!! I was given the summary report, which contained anonymized snippets from the external letters and all I can say is 😭😭😭 THANK YOU (if you're on here) for taking the time to write these, such a great confidence boost.
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When I first learned of
@ScienceMarchDC
yesterday, they had about 300 followers. They now have 24k. Hell yeah, scientists!
#resist
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OMG you guys. We noticed a couple of weeks ago that a female praying mantis had taken up residence in our window box, and it looks like today she got her man. I have never seen this up close and in person, it is amazing!!
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Can y’all just reassure me that even though you love your job, you still have days when you feel like you’re absolute garbage at it?
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I am honestly blown away that there is even a conversation to be had about whether to send people to lab when your city has curfew. The answer is obviously no. If your trainees believe you value their productivity over their lives, you should not be a PI.
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"Because you tried really hard for a really long time."
Anyone from way back science Twitter remember who made this? It came up in my fb memories and is so brilliant I think it needs another day in the sun.
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I have watched this video 20x consecutively, it is perfect content.
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TFW your twitter rant turns into a Science Perspective
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What being a PI is like: feeling excited that you finally checked enough admin stuff off your to-do list that at 3:30 you can start working on a paper.
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Just put my NIH grant experience to good use refreshing the Amazon checkout page over and over until a Whole Foods delivery slot appeared.
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🤬🤬🤬 seeing “this study is in males, but they will do it in females next.” Is a replication study going to make it into Nature Communications? PTSD is 2x as prevalent in women as in men. If you frame your research as relevant to PTSD, do it in both sexes (best) or females FIRST
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A note for
#NSFGRFP
news-getters today. When I was a grad student, I didn’t get the GRFP (or Honorable Mention), and my PO for my very poorly scored F31 told me I probably shouldn’t be a scientist. Now I have tenure. The end!
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OMG minor revisions on a paper that downright consumed me for years. I might pass out from joy.
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In totally inconsequential news (but that I’m too excited about not to tweet)...
I PAID OFF MY COLLEGE LOANS TODAY!!!!!
What a strange feeling.
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R56 NOA!!!!!
I GOT BRIDGE FUNDING, BABY!!!!!!!
Who wants to be my post-doc?
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Did not expect 😭😭😭 but I just found out promotion to Full is official, and it is hitting me hard! What a journey. I really do love this job.
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I so appreciate this honest response from
@bjmarlin
in her
@Brain_Facts_org
interview (last RT). Basic neuroscientists are constantly pushed to tie their findings directly to humans and (especially when it comes to
#SABV
) it’s often just not that simple.
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Folks I am begging you to show your female data even if the experiment “didn’t work” like it did in males, that is still interesting and important!
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All I heard was “Covid-19 Care Bears”
Most Patients’ Covid-19 Care Bears Little Resemblance to Trump’s
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full stop this is the most amazing video I've ever seen
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We need to change the culture in rodent research. Experiments in females are not a side project. They are not follow-up studies. They are not something you pawn off on your 3rd favorite grad student. They are as valuable to public health as those in males (in some cases more).
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At first I was mad at my data bc it wasn't telling me what I thought it would. But then I thought about it a little more and it actually makes more sense than my original hypothesis and is a way cooler story and now I am PUMPED to write this grant!
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My office is finally done! I love it so much. Here are two shots in opposite directions plus a parallel “before” shot. A few details in following tweets.
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Now that it’s blazer season again, this is your friendly reminder to snip that little thread holding the back flaps together.
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If you’re worried about variability, someone has already done the work for you, here. Data from male mice and male rats are just as variable as that from females.
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Not in a million fucking years would I get in this bed.
These beds can save your life in the event of an earthquake.
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The state is on lockdown but the Uni is telling grad students they are welcome to go to lab and continue their research??!!!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤯🤯🤯
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“Quality” does not only mean Cell/Nature/Science. Refusing to publish scientifically sound data because it isn’t glam-worthy is an unethical use of taxpayer $$ and unfair to your trainees, who are ALSO people with goals and lives and careers.
Deep sigh.
This sets up a totally wrong narrative. PIs are not servants to the career ambitions of trainees but people with goals and lives and careers. It's part of our jobs to maintain output quality.
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So ask yourself why people get stuck SPECIFICALLY on the idea that hormones matter so much for females and not males?
Ask yourself whether a part of you sees the male brain as “standard,” and the female brain as some sort of altered version of that?
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I had a real moment of clarity talking to a program officer today. I realized that after six years of unfunded NIH grants, I've become so beat down by nit-picky comments in my summary statements that I've been afraid to write about any kind of big picture vision.
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I would love, just once in study section, for someone to say "I have nothing to add" and then actually stop talking.
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It felt like I took more, but this was all my freezing fingers could handle last night.
#SuperBloodWolfMoon
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Dropped a "Eet iz wahfer thin" reference at dinner with a bunch of grad students tonight and the only person who got it was the waiter 😭😫😭😫😭
This is CLASSIC CINEMA, millennials! Monty Python is canon. Educate yourselves.
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If I am 80 and decide my career needs another chapter, you all have my permission to tie me to a poolside chaise lounge and force feed me Aperol Spritzes until I come to my senses.
BREAKING: Dr. Anthony Fauci says he will step down from his post in December to pursue the "next chapter" of his career.
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Worried about the estrous cycle for your Oct
#NIH
submission? Say this: “This proposal does not test hypotheses regarding the influence of ovarian hormones , and therefore we will not be monitoring the estrous cycle in our female animals.” cite doi: 10.1126/science.aaw7570
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We wouldn't need "5 co-first author" papers if the bar for high profile publishing hadn't climbed to 3 R01s worth of work across multiple labs, and/or such papers weren't viewed as necessary for getting R1 faculty jobs (they're not).
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I hear this complaint a lot, but IMO words like these can also help with the pace and cadence of the writing. All you're really doing is asking the reader to pause for a half-second and pay a tiny bit more attention to what comes next.
@stephenfloor
'Remarkably', 'interestingly', 'surprisingly' and similar adverbs are very often used with the aim of providing emphasis, but their actual function is to persuade rather than to convey information. If the data are indeed remarkable, readers will not need prompting to believe so.
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Yay, paper accepted! This paper was originally submitted just before Christmas and has now officially lapped the one we submitted in September and resubmitted a month ago.
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@NellENel
@AnandWrites
It looks exhausting! I’m also exhausted watching the other guy do separate but coordinated activities with all four limbs!
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Today I had to book a plane ticket on the phone, and instead of putting me on hold while everything went through, the representative talked to me about his fountain pen collection. His joy was so earnest and pure and totally made my day.
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“We’ll do the work in females as soon as we complete the study in males”
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Yay, minor revisions for my very opinionated opinion piece! Reviewer 3 called it “timely” and “elegant.” 😊
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I want to reiterate that this thread does NOT say that hormone research isn’t important - it is immensely so. The point is that hormones are NO MORE important to females than to males. So claiming that studying females suddenly necessitates the study of hormones is biased.
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I wrote a grant. A new R01, from scratch, in a new field. In a month. I am SPENT.
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Male variability is by and large shrugged off as normal, but all the pearl clutching from people with no neuroendocrine background about how we couldn’t possibly know anything about the female brain unless we have a detailed readout of E2 levels is SEXIST.
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Absolutely love getting a request to review for a journal that rejected my paper 2 days ago.
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There obviously are people who just fly in and out to give a talk at conferences, but TBH looking back, the most important part of my conference experiences as a jr scientist was building my network of *other* jr scientists, not meeting bigwigs.
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Had to say goodbye to our beautiful Pippin today 😢 I will miss this snuggly, avocado-eating, door-objecting, Mr White-chasing kitty so much 💔
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My lab sac'd the very last of our rats yesterday and it is quite a gutting feeling to know the lights are truly out. For the foreseeable future this account is only cute animals, food, gardening, and other sources of sanity.
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It 👏 is 👏 not 👏 flaunting 👏 to 👏 ask 👏 to 👏 be 👏 called 👏 by 👏 your 👏 earned 👏 title.
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#stress2018
"when I started my lab, I decided to do every experiment in both males and females, so that way my students would never know there was any other way to do it." -
@RCBagot
👏👏👏👏
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100% bona fide bragging about this shakshuka I just made with tomatoes I canned from the garden this summer.
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Literally thousands of male-only grants have been funded and papers published without demands for testosterone or corticosterone assays.
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"Our findings argue for the inclusion of both sexes in experiments querying behavior and support the perspective that females—rather than males—should be the default sex used in studies of exploratory behavior in circumstances in which both sexes cannot be tested." 🔥
Female mice are studied less than males in part because of a belief held by some that the estrous cycle makes all female mouse behavior more variable. But is this true? Check out our latest, led by
@danarubilevy
in collab with
@shanskylab
!
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Anyone else playing music for their students as they enter the zoom class? I feel like this is my chance to be the college radio DJ I always wanted to be.
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The problem with catching up on email is that them everyone emails you back and then you’re no longer caught up.
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I have eaten
the leftover Halloween candy
that I brought in
for the lab
and which
my students were probably
hoping
to snack on
Forgive me
I am delirious
so jet-lagged
and so tired
from taking the red-eye back from
#SfN18
so I could teach today
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I went without summer salary for so long when the lab was unfunded, now that it’s available (and budgeted) I have to convince myself that I deserve it.
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New office decor is almost done and it is turning out exactly like the Palm Springs oasis workspace I envisioned!
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Several thoughts on this terrible article:
1. Saying you are “humbled” to receive an award is not humblebragging.
2. It is ok to be excited about your successes, even if it makes people sad.
1/2
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Their teeth
Could not penetrate
THE FLOOF
This sheep escaped a farm and spent 6 years in the mountains, during which time he grew 60 pounds of wool. Wolves tried to eat him, but their teeth could not penetrate the floof. You don't have to turn hard to survive the wolves, just be really, really soft and fluffy.
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Next time you go to submit a manuscript, look at your list of suggested reviewers. Have you recommended only white men? If so, do not hit submit. There are WW and POC in your field. Take the extra time to find them and stop perpetuating boys’ clubs.
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This mini-thread on the stages of learning to read scientific papers rings very true. Stage 5 - skip to the references to see if they cited you.
My personal philosophy is that learning to read papers occurs in stages. Stage 1: late undergrad/early grad school. The goal is simply to understand what claims the paper is making and how they did what they did. Stage 2: grad school. Learn to be hypercritical 1/
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Am I nuts or does this painting in my hotel bathroom remind anyone else a little of hippocampal granule cells?
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Me: Could you pick up some basil when you stop by Whole Foods?
My husband:
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Tenure appeal officially in! It is literally out of my hands forever. Trying not to have a panic attack now.
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So there a horse in the Kentucky Derby today named “Highly Motivated”—guess I know who all the PIs are rooting for...
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It was hard to think back on the roller coaster I’ve been through this year, but the words are there.
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Latest maddening grant review (paraphrasing): "Even though you have published evidence that the estrous cycle is not involved in this behavior, it is still necessary to monitor it."
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This video is exceptional but what I can’t wrap my head around is who decides to get a puppy when they just got a baby a few months ago.
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