Get ready to organize your OHBM schedule: the OHBM Student-Postdoc SIG is hosting events especially for our students and postdocs! Add stickers to your badge, join a networking mentorship lunch, attend a roundtable on becoming an independent researcher and a symposium on non-academic neuroscience applications, and don’t miss the highly anticipated student and postdoc social!
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Do you dread the thought of writing your manuscript? Have you been putting off the task of compiling all your lab journal notes into a cohesive story? Fear not! With a few guiding principles, a little organization, and a lot of undistracted focus, you can create the first imperfect draft of your manuscript in no time.
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Dr. Arshiya Sangchooli’s journey from medical school to a research degree in a new country has been one of perseverance and resilience. Despite facing difficulties as a neurodivergent person and queer person of color, he remains dedicated to research and passionate about his field. In his new lab, he uses innovative approaches to advance our understanding of visual processing in the human brain. Their story serves as a reminder of the importance of supporting diverse voices in academia and the potential for individuals to achieve great things when they have space to pursue their passions.
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As academic researchers, we usually write scripts independently and without much guidance since we often work on projects alone. Thus, we focus on getting code to work rather than its readability or efficiency, but this can result in clunky code that is hard to validate. In contrast, software engineers receive formal training on writing clear and efficient code and work in teams, where code review and collaboration are essential. Despite our lack of training, it is extremely important that our work is reproducible and that our code is well tested and easy to read. Lack of proper coding etiquette and review can lead to mistakes, causing heart-pounding moments as we frantically double-check results. To avoid some of these nail-biting moments and ensure our code is efficient, reproducible, and clean, we have compiled a list of suggestions, beginning with general coding practices and ending with more specific tips from such software engineers who write code professionally.
Read MoreThe OHBM Student and Postdoc Special Interest Group (SP-SIG) has been successfully running an international mentoring programme online since 2017. This programme fosters mentorship relationships at all training levels, from undergraduate students to principal investigators, matching people across the globe based on experience and interests. Mentees and mentors are encouraged to meet in person at the annual meeting.
Read MoreAs part of a lead up to this year’s hybrid Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) annual meeting, the Student and Postdoc Special Interest group (SP SIG) organized a series of workshops to provide trainees with resources for career development. As a group, we aim to cater to the variety of interests in our trainee community, both for those interested in pursuing an academic career, and those interested in moving outside of academia. In this blogpost, I will be highlighting the lessons learned from the workshop on Science Policy, Advocacy, and Communication. Our guest speakers included Dr. Joseph B Keller, Dr. Fanuel Muindi, and Dr. Vania Cao. While the workshop focused on careers outside of academia, much of the valuable advice shared by our speakers will be useful to all trainees as they prepare for the next phases of their professional journey.
Read MoreFor most people, receiving a diagnosis is usually not a positive experience. But for me, being diagnosed with ADHD at age 19 was a huge relief. I finally felt like I had answers and validation for almost 2 decades of self-doubt and struggling. Up to that point, my intelligence had felt like a paradox: I was smart enough to have been placed in a gifted STEM program at age 8 and to easily excel in my science, history, and language classes. But when it came to math, my brain took more practice to get the hang of keeping all the numbers, rules, and symbols straight.
Read MoreThis year, the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) is planning an in person, hybrid Annual Meeting from Sunday, June 19th - Thursday, June 23rd at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) in Glasgow, Scotland. Virtual keynotes and poster sessions will occur from June 7-8th, 2022. Scientific conferences are an integral part of most scientific disciplines, providing scientists of all career stages the opportunity to share new research. They allow attendees to deepen their understanding of a topic, to meet new people, and to gain fresh perspectives in different disciplines. Multiple days of uninterrupted learning and sharing of ideas with others in the neuroimaging community might sound like a dream come true to some. It may be quite daunting for others, as we emerge from two years of remote life, with limited social stimulation. Furthermore, for many, this will be the first in-person conference of their scientific careers. Here, we hope to share some tips and guidelines for maximizing your experience at the conference.
Read MoreFollowing the annual OHBM conference, a group of the organization’s members and conference attendees came together to discuss the future of OHBM in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental considerations, as well as the exclusivity to annual conference favouring rich, established, Western institutions. Hajer Nakua (Chair SP-SIG, 2020-2021) and Dr. Elvisha Dhamala (Social Media Coordinator SP-SIG, 2020-2021) participated in the discussion and provided important reflections here, which we summarize below.
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We are getting closer to the annual OHBM conference and I hope you all are as excited as we are! To help you better understand what we passionately work on within the SIG these days, we created a list of our upcoming events. For those that prefer an audible summary, checkout a recent podcast that highlighted some of the SIG’s events, particularly centered around mentorship: bit.ly/3bDRYsl.
Read MoreVirtual conferences have been rising in popularity over the past few years, and have become a necessity to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Virtual participation may afford us the opportunity to attend conferences we may not have been able to otherwise, in part due to reduced time and financial commitment required to attend. Additionally, bypassing air travel provides a more environmentally friendly platform through which to connect. Similar to in-person conferences, virtual conferences can be great for your career, providing attendees the exciting opportunity to learn from a wider audience, gain insightful information from speakers, and to network with other attendees.
Read MoreMarianne Chapleau (MC): Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me today. I really enjoyed reading your article on research culture and the working conditions of early career researchers (ECRs) in Australia. Among others, you mention the notions of “hypercompetitive funding environments” and “low grant funding success rate”. Could you comment on these topics?
Read MoreThe beginning of 2021 has been difficult for all of us. The pandemic remains a hot topic and tense political situations, particularly in the US, are additional stressors at the start of this year. Alarming data confirms that psychological distress is widespread across the globe and that it does not spare any age group (WHO Survey, 2020). The measures implemented to reduce the progression of the virus fortunately had an impact on virus transmission, but it also had deleterious consequences on mental health. Although the current situation appears to be progressing towards the better (i.e. lower transmission rates, a new vaccine being available in many areas, etc.), the measures put in place to reduce the spread of the virus will likely remain for a large portion of 2021.
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This year at the virtual OHBM’s Annual Mentoring and Career Development Symposium, we invited three wonderful mentors to present lessons they have learned along their own academic journeys related to the theme “Success in academia: A road paved with failures”. We opened up a live 30-minute Q&A session at the end of the symposium but as is all too common, time flew by and it was impossible to get through all of the thoughtful questions our trainees had. We followed up recently with Dr’s Terry Jernigan, Xavier Castellanos, and Erin Barker, and gained their valuable tidbits of wisdom on navigating current academic waters as a trainee.
Read MoreIn 2017, The OHBM Student and Postdoc SIG launched an International online mentorship programme me where mentors/mentees pairs are matched based on their goals and experience. This is a unique experience where mentees can find direct mentorship and guidance to navigate their career path from mentors with at least three years of experience difference.
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With the virtual OHBM meeting just around the corner, we simply can’t ignore the reason why we’re holding a virtual conference in the first place, along with the shift in productivity, coping adaptations, and mental health states that we have all experienced in recent times. I had the pleasure of sitting down virtually with Emma Kaywin, a conflict mediator and sexual health educator in New York City, who shared her expertise on trauma counseling and its links with the broad spectrum of challenges we have had to face in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and amplified by recent civil unrest. Check out the interview below and don’t miss our workshop that will be led by Emma after the main OHBM conference program, to be held on Friday, August 7, 10am EST.
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It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed and distracted right now. The coronavirus has seemingly infected everyone’s lives, one way or another. News platforms, podcasts, social media platforms, work emails, personal communications, phone calls with friends and family, flyers at your local cafe - COVID-19 has become a very big part of our reality. And this has called for some drastic measures to reduce the spread of infection.
As with many other people, academics around the world have been encouraged (or mandated) to work from home and exercise social distancing, doing our part in keeping ourselves and others safe. It’s a situation unlike any other and we’re writing the handbook of surviving a pandemic in the 21st century as we go along. We might not have all of the answers right now, but there are ways we can harness the power of social media and technology to help each other through this.
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Dr. Adriana Bankston is a Principal Legislative Analyst in the University of California Office of Federal Governmental Relations (FGR). In this role, she serves as an advocate for UC with Congress, the Administration and federal agencies. Prior to this position, she was a Policy & Advocacy Fellow at The Society for Neuroscience (SfN), where she provided staff support for special and on-going projects, including SfN’s annual lobby event and the society’s annual meeting. In addition to working at UC, Adriana serves as Vice-President of Future of Research (FoR), a non-profit organization whose mission is to champion, engage and empower early career scientists with evidence-based resources to improve the scientific research endeavor. She is also Chief Outreach Officer at the Journal of Science Policy and Governance (JSPG), a non-profit and interdisciplinary peer review publication serving as a vehicle for students, policy fellows, young professionals and early career scholars to publish on the widest range of science, technology and innovation policy topics. Adriana obtained a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Cell and Developmental Biology from Emory University and a Bachelor’s in Biological Sciences from Clemson University.
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Recently, I wrote my first book entitled ‘What is out there for me? The landscape post-PhD career tracks’; it is now available on Amazon (in an ebook and a paperback form). How did it happen? Was it hard to write a book?
Deep inside, I always wanted to write books. Writing makes me happy and I feel that I have an aptitude for writing as well (well, maybe there is some causal connection here…). Whenever I think about my dream future, I used to think that if ever I am lucky enough to get enough passive income, then one day I would like to live in the woods and write books. And in the end, it came to my mind: why not now?
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