Unsolicited Advice

See Lena Ting’s presentation at the bottom of this page for additional tips for submitting an NSF GRFP application. Abbreviations: Overview: The purpose of this document is not to review all of the NSF guidelines for the GRFP. Check the NSF guidelines for more detail on IM and BI and why they are important. In […]

Many people want to write a history of their field, or lots of statistics about a disease in the Significance. These points are only helpful to the reviewer in the context of the work that you propose to do. So, as stand-alone facts they may be true, but how do they help convince the reviewer

I have been wanting to write this for about five years and finally have my first attempt. I think about the aims and solving a puzzle, an important one for crystallizing and structuring my entire grant. I start my sketching, drawing, writing single sentences that capture my ideas, and not necessarily writing. The Aims page

Here is a very old document that I wrote up early in my career about how to create a lab meeting where everyone participates. It came out of my experiences participating in a variety of lab meeting styles. I wanted a safe and productive space for my graduate students and undergrads alike. Over the years,

Once upon a time there was a healthy scientific community on Twitter where we discussed science ideas and promoted our research. But alas, this community has broken apart since Twitter became X. Here are a series of tweets I made in response to a poll by Josh Cashaback about whether we make distinctions between hypotheses

I know that there is a very long and boring set of instructions for writing NIH grants, called the SF424: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/how-to-apply-application-guide.html This page is particularly helpful in listing what the review criteria are, and some tips about writing the proposal. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/how-to-apply-application-guide/format-and-write/write-your-application.htm For example, under Writing Tip #3: What points should you address? I can’t find

A big learning curve for graduate students is reading the literature. I’ve seen student spend hours and days reading every single word of a scientific paper. And this is a good exercise for class, to learn all the parts and see all the things that you don’t know. But when you’re preparing your own research,

Here is my very dated information on preparing for an academic job search, but the principles are still the same. Remember that there are so many factors governing on faculty hires beyond your ability to do great research. It’s important to get feedback on your materials, especially from those not directly in your field. You

Sometimes students have trouble writing because, like me, they hated English class. But writing a scientific paper is not like the creative writing process, it is more like coding. Here’s a way to stop conflating the need to write eloquent prose and think about alliteration so you can progress on writing your paper in a