Science
Some Virtues of Virtual Panels
Douglas Fisher, an associate professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University, started his 3-year rotation as program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2007. That fall, he convened and chaired in-person panels to decide the fate of NSF grant proposals in information sciences....
Read MoreElite Male Faculty Employ Fewer Women
Jason Sheltzer is a graduate student in cancer genomics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He works in the Amon Lab, where the principal investigator (PI), half the graduate students and half the postdocs are women. Sheltzer was astonished when a friend at...
Read MoreMany Strikes, Never Out
In 2009, Chandrakala Puligilla, a young biomedical researcher who studies cell fate specification in mammals, won the prestigious K99 award—the postdoctoral half of the prestigious transition award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—on her first attempt. In 2011, she became an assistant professor at the...
Read MoreThe College Science Teacher
It is common to encounter Ph.D. students and recent graduates who want to focus solely on their students, on teaching and advising. They picture themselves in college faculty roles, but teaching is their first love. Unfortunately for them, tenure-track faculty posts pretty much always come...
Read MoreCloudburst of Computing Power
For U.S. academics, computational resources are not hard to come by. The National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program, for 25 years has made computation and storage platforms available, free-of-charge to academic researchers in the United States with high-performance computing (HPC)...
Read MoreComputer Scientists Get Wet
In the summer of 2008, Wired magazine ran a cover story titled “The End of Science.” Former Editor‑in‑Chief Chris Anderson argued that the data deluge had rewritten the scientific method: with enough information and the computational power to analyze it, correlation could outrun causation, theories...
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