The 500 Women Scientists Eugene, Oregon Pod is inviting you to join our Science Salons for Puerto Rico Campaign. For the last year, our amazing women scientists have put their communication skills to use within our community. Now, we’re channeling that energy into a concerted campaign to raise money to support our amazing partners at CienciaPR as they work to transform science education in Puerto Rico and around the world.
Throughout history, salons have acted as gathering places for conversation “either to please or to educate” (Latin: aut delectare aut prodesse). From the salons of the Enlightenment to the 1940s salons of Gertrude Stein, women have played a central role in guiding and driving the discussion.
500 Women Scientists has borrowed from the spirit of the salon to bring discussions about science to the communities we serve. We invite you to listen to speakers sharing 10 to 20 minute talks about their work, geared toward a public audience, followed by ample time for questions and discussion. The purpose of the salon is two-fold, creating an opportunity for the community to learn about our membership’s amazing research while giving our members a platform to hone their public speaking skills. And by charging admission — through a donation — the Salon will raise money for CienciaPR to transform science education in Puerto Rico. Ciencia PR is a global community of scientists, students, educators and allies who believe that science can empower individuals with the knowledge, capacity, and agency to improve their lives and society.
As a women-led nonprofit, CienciaPR taps into its rich and diverse community to democratize science and transform science education and career training in Puerto Rico. We’ve partnered with CienciaPR because our missions to democratize science and foster agency among underrepresented communities are well-aligned. While CienciaPR focuses on Puerto Rico and its diaspora, their strategy can serve as a model to other communities that are underrepresented in or disengaged from science. We are thrilled to support their ongoing efforts and learn from their organization’s successes in building capacity and fostering community.
Immediately after Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, CienciaPR worked with the Department of Education to create disaster-related and project-based science lesson plans that could allow displaced students to continue learning. Early in 2018, CienciaPR will launch a pilot project to train educators to implement four science lessons in natural disaster and environment related topics: renewable energy, environmental sustainability, clean and potable water, and terrestrial ecosystems. Later in the year, they will bring together scientists and educators to co-create project-based science lessons that foster creativity, entrepreneurship, and critical thinking skills. These new lessons will serve as a platform for students to work together to address the challenges they see in their communities. This pilot project kicks off the implementation of CienciaPR’s new 10-year strategic plan of transforming science education in Puerto Rico, by engaging its community of scientists, educators, and students to bring discovery, experimentation, and problem-solving to the classroom in ways that are culturally and socially relevant to Puerto Rican children.
For the past two months, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time writing grant proposals. In particular; those which expand our understanding of indoor lighting on human health and behavior, the indoor microbiome, and energy usage in buildings. These project proposals are collaborative efforts between several University of Oregon research labs: Biology and the Built Environment Center, Energy Studies and Buildings Laboratory, and the Baker Lighting Lab. I’ll have more updates in the next few months as those are reviewed.
Siobhan “Shevy” Rockcastle, Chair of the Baker Lighting Lab, and I have been brainstorming ideas, and today I went over to the Baker Lab to check it out in person. The Lab is decorated with concept-design lighting projects from previous students, which are not only beautiful, but extremely creative. Here are a few of my favorites!
Most studies that examine the microbial diversity of the gastrointestinal tract only look at one or two sample sites, usually the mouth, the rumen in ruminant animals, or the feces. It can be difficult, expensive, invasive, or fatal to get samples from deep inside the intestinal tract; however many studies have pointed out that anatomical location and local environmental factors (like temperature, pH, host cells, nutrient availability, and exposure to UV light) can dramatically change a microbial community. Thus, the microbes that we find in feces aren’t always what we would find in the stomach or along the intestines. On top of that, certain microorganisms have been shown to closely associate with or attach to host cells, and the diversity of microbes next to host tissues can be different from what’s at the center of the intestines (the digesta).
This large, collaborative project took samples from nine different sites along the digestive tract of calves over the first 21 days of life to determine how body sites differed from each other, how sites changed over time as the calf matured, and how the lumen-associated bacteria would differ from the digesta-associated bacteria. Samples from the mothers were also taken to understand how maternal microbial influence would affect body sites over time.
This paper was just published in Scientific Reports, and was something I had previously presented on at the Joint Annual Meeting of the American Society for Animal Science, the American Dairy Science Association, and the Canadian Society for Animal Science in Salt Lake City, UT in 2016.
The impact of maternal microbial influences on the early choreography of the neonatal calf microbiome were investigated. Luminal content and mucosal scraping samples were collected from ten locations in the calf gastrointestinal tract (GIT) over the first 21 days of life, along with postpartum maternal colostrum, udder skin, and vaginal scrapings. Microbiota were found to vary by anatomical location, between the lumen and mucosa at each GIT location, and differentially enriched for maternal vaginal, skin, and colostral microbiota. Most calf sample sites exhibited a gradual increase in α-diversity over the 21 days beginning the first few days after birth. The relative abundance of Firmicutes was greater in the proximal GIT, while Bacteroidetes were greater in the distal GIT. Proteobacteria exhibited greater relative abundances in mucosal scrapings relative to luminal content. Forty-six percent of calf luminal microbes and 41% of mucosal microbes were observed in at-least one maternal source, with the majority being shared with microbes on the skin of the udder. The vaginal microbiota were found to harbor and uniquely share many common and well-described fibrolytic rumen bacteria, as well as methanogenic archaea, potentially indicating a role for the vagina in populating the developing rumen and reticulum with microbes important to the nutrition of the adult animal.
At a conference this summer, I attended a lunch discussion on gender equality in science, and diversity and equity in the workplace in general, hosted by the activist group; 500 Women Scientists. What was planned to be a small meeting of 20-30 women very quickly turned into a standing-room-only event as an unexpected number of women and allies arrived; a momentum which has been gathering since the inception of 500WS. Following the 2016 presidential election, four women decided it was time to act and founded the organization with the goal of getting 500 women in STEM to sign an open letter in support of science. As of writing this, more than 20,000 supporters from over 100 countries have joined the movement, which has sparked a number of actions.
Second, 500WS aims to create gender equality in STEM and the workplace in general, by promoting inclusion, by advocating for employee-friendly practices, and by reducing bias. These policies not only help women, for example; they help working parents of all genders through the implementation of policies like parental leave. One of the 500WS measures is providing an online resource for people to Request A Scientist, to promote the visibility of women in STEM and support their inclusion in news articles, on panels, as speakers, and in leadership positions. This visibility in the media reinforces the idea that women are actively working in STEM, are making important contributions to it, and can help dispel gender stereotypes and bias which lead to pay discrepancies and missed career opportunities. Along with similar resources like the Diverse Sources Database, 500WS seeks to reinforce the idea that scientists come in all sorts of formats.
Third, 500WS is an activist group. In addition to promoting the March for Science movement last year and this year, they regularly post actionable items for women in STEM and supporters on their Take Action Tuesday blog posts. Most recently, 500WS is also launching a Science Salon campaign to raise money for Puerto Rico, which has yet to recover from catastrophic hurricane damage due to insufficient US recovery funds and a lack of media attention.
I am thrilled to announce that I’m also joining the 500 Women Scientists Eugene Pod as a co-coordinator! The Eugene Pod leadership has been working hard to develop a Eugene Science Salon, and we hope to make it a reoccurring event which will promote local women in STEM, increase public engagement and education in STEM, and raise money for a variety of causes.
Connect with 500WS
You can find the Eugene Pod online on Facebook and Twitter and both women in STEM and supporters of any gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, age, career path, field, and preferred Oregon college sports’ mascot are welcome to join. If you are a woman (the inclusive definition of woman) in the Eugene area who would like to join the group and attend meetings to plan larger events, please join our Meetup group.
Last night, I gave my first “science stand-up” as part of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) Science Pub series at Whirled Pies in Eugene, OR. I really enjoy giving public presentations of my work, and while I’ve been on stage with a microphone before, it was the first time I got a stool to put my drink on.
I gave a talk which encompassed much of my previous work on host-associated microbiomes in moose and other ruminants, as well as more current research from others on the human gut. It’s difficult enough to fit the field of host-associated microbiomes into a semester-long class, nevermind an hour (I digress), so I kept it to the highlights: “A crash course on the microbiome of the digestive tract“. You can find the slides here: Ishaq OMSI SciPub 20180208, although there is no video presentation at this time. I was honored to have such a well-attended lecture (about 120 people!) with an engaged audience, who had some really on-track questions about the intersection of microbial diversity and health.
Photo Credit: Al Lebovitz
As I’ve discussed here before, academic outreach is a sometimes overlooked, yet nevertheless extremely important, aspect of science. The members of the general public are a large portion of our stakeholder audience, and outreach helps disseminate that research knowledge, facilitate transparency of the research process, and engage people who might benefit from or be interested in our work. As I told the audience last night, scientists do like when people ask us about our work, but “we’re more scared of you than you are of us”. I encourage everyone to add science to their life by getting informed, getting involved, and getting out to vote.
Thanks again to OMSI for inviting me to participate, and to Whirled Pies for hosting!
As a thank you, I received this awesome pint glass!
Last June, I started a position as a Research Assistant Professor of Microbial Ecology at the Biology and the Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon. The BioBE Center is a collaborative, interdisciplinary research team investigating the built environment – the ecosystem that humans have created for themselves in buildings, vehicles, roadways, cities, etc. With my background in host-associated microbiology, I am concerned with how the built environment interacts with biology.
In addition to knowing how our presence, our behaviors (ex. cleaning), and how we run our buildings (ex. ventilation) creates the indoor microbiome, I want to know how the indoor microbiome affects us back. Not only can “sick buildings” negatively affect air quality, but they can harbor more microorganisms, especially fungi, or pathogenic species which are detrimental to our health.
My first indoor microbiome data is one that I have inherited from an ongoing project on weatherization in homes, and hope to present some of that work at conferences this summer. Since June, a large amount of my time has gone into project development and grant writing, most of which is still pending, so stay tuned for details. It has involved read lots of articles, going to seminars, networking, and brainstorming with some brilliant researchers.
As research faculty, I am not required to teach, although I have the option to propose and teach courses by adjusting my percent effort (I would use the teaching salary to “buy back” some research salary). As I am not currently tenure-track, I am also limited in my ability to hire and formally mentor students. However, I have been teaching bioinformatics to a student who recently graduated with his bachelor’s and is pursuing a masters in bioinformatics later this year.
I’ve also been keeping up with my science outreach. I gave a presentation on my host-associated microbiome work, I marched, I volunteered for a few hours at Meet A Scientist day at the Eugene Science Center, and I’m hosting a Science Pub on “A crash course in the microbiome of the digestive tract” at Whirled Pies in Eugene this Thursday, February 8th!
The end of 2017 marks the second year of my website, as well as another year of life-changing events, and reflecting on the past year’s milestones help put all those long hours into perspective. I reviewed my year last year, and found it particularly helpful in focusing my goals for the year ahead.
This involved another large move, not only from Montana to Oregon, which has led to some awesome new adventures, but also from agriculture and animal science to indoor microbiomes and building science. So far, it has been a wonderful learning experience for incorporating research techniques and perspectives from other fields into my work.
This year, I added fournewresearchpublications and one review publication to my C.V., and received word that a massive collaborative study that I contributed to was accepted for publication- more on that once it’s available. In April, I hosted a day of workshops on soil microbes for the Expanding Your Horizons for Girls program at MSU, and I gave a seminar at UO on host-associated microbiomes while dressed up as a dissected cat on Halloween. In November, I participated in a Design Champs webinar; a pilot series from BioBE which provides informational discussions to small groups of building designers on aspects of how architecture and biology interact.
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I published 34 posts in 2017, including this one, which is significantly fewer than the 45 I published in 2016. However, I have doubled my visitor traffic and views over last year’s totals: over 2,000 visitors with over 3,200 page views in 2017! My highest-traffic day was April 27th, 2017. While I am most popular in the United States, I have had visitors from 92 countries this year!
I also added some “life” to my work-life balance; in November, I married my best friend and “chief contributor“, Lee, in a small, stress-free ceremony with some local friends in Eugene, Oregon!!
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Looking Ahead
I have high hopes for 2018, notably, I’d like to finish more of the projects that have been in development over the last two years during my post-docs. Nearly all academics carry forward old projects: some need additional time for experimentation or writing, some get shelved temporarily due to funding or time constraints, some datasets get forgotten and gather dust, and some which got cut short because of the need to move to a new job. This is a particular concern as grant funding and length of job postings become shorter, forcing researchers to cut multi-year projects short or finish them on their own time. After defending in early 2015, I had two one-year postings and started at UO in June 2017, making this my fourth job in three years. I’m looking forward to roosting for a bit, not only to clear out unfinished business, but also to settle into my new job at BioBE. This fall, I have been analyzing data on a weatherization project, writing a handful of grants, and developing pilot projects with collaborators. I have really enjoyed my first six months at BioBE, and Lee and I have taken a shine to Eugene. In the next few months, I hope to have more posts about my work there, exciting new developments in BioBE and ESBL, and more insights into the work life of an academic. Happy New Year!
Recently, a colleague recommended using Voyant Tools to analyze texts, so I thought I would give it a try. Language metrics can give a fascinating look into a text, and in this example, into what my most commonly used words are, how verbose I can be, and how diverse my written vocabulary is. It’s important to note that these metrics are sensitive to citation style, the use of text in legends or tables, and other bits of text in manuscripts or webpages that may get incorporated which aren’t part of the text, strictly speaking. When possible, I uploaded just the written portion of the manuscript.
My first publication
Insight into the bacterial gut microbiome of the North American moose (Alces alces), was written in 2012 and published in BMC Microbiology, which does not have a word limit. According to Voyant, the document contains 5,904 total words and 1,489 unique word forms. Vocabulary Density, the ratio of the number of words in the document to the number of unique words in the document, is 0.252. A lower vocabulary density indicates complex text with lots of unique words, and a higher ratio indicates simpler text with words reused. Average Words Per Sentence is 27.1, and Most frequent words are: rumen (80); otus (68); samples (67); moose (54); colon (50)..
My dissertation, written in 2015, contains 75,859 total words and 8,958 unique word forms. Vocabulary Density: 0.118, Average Words Per Sentence: 12.9, Most frequent words are: rumen (632); moose (411); sequences (323); using (304); samples (284).
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Summary
To look at all my first authored research publications to date, I put all the text from the word documents together, excluding figure and table legends, as well as reference lists. Across these 8 documents, there were 40,860 total words and 5,059 unique word forms, Vocabulary Density: 0.124, Average Words Per Sentence: 26.6, Most frequent words: rumen (304); samples (301); sequences (275); using (265); moose (226).
As we rapidly approach the end of both the fall semester and 2017, it’s a great time to reflect about the year’s accomplishments (update your C.V.) and look forward to what 2018 will bring (panic about all the things you haven’t finished yet that need to be completed by the end of the year).
Time management is a reoccurring theme in academia, and with so many items on one’s to-do list, it’s not hard to see why. Everyone has their own advice about how to be more effective; which was the very first meeting in this year’s Faculty Organizing for Success professional development workshop series, which I attended in October. I compiled some of the suggestions made there, along with advice I’ve picked up over the years, and strategies I use which I’ve found to be effective.
One of the major questions that came up at the FOS meeting was time management in the face of academic duties, namely service. Academics have a requirement to provide service or outreach to their university, the community, and their field, and as I’ve previously discussed, these amorphous responsibilities can be time-consuming and under-appreciated. Sometimes, turning off your ringer, closing your email application, or saying “no” isn’t enough or isn’t possible. So, how can you make the most of your time while navigating the constraints of a fractured schedule?
Lists
I find lists to be extremely helpful in keeping track of everything I need to do, and it really helps me focus on what I need to get done TODAY.
Lists help me organize my thoughts
by adding notes for each particular item
and ordering the steps I need to take to finish each item.
Being able to cross tasks off a physical list is also a great visual reminder that you are, in fact, being productive.
And, at the end of the day, the remaining items form a new list, so I know where to begin tomorrow. This saves me a lot of time which would otherwise be spent trying to remember where and how I left off.
Calendars
Don’t like lists? I also heavily rely on my calendar and will schedule appointments for everything, especially the little things that I’m liable to forget, including catching up on emails, lunch, reading articles, writing posts, etc. I utilize color-coding and multiple calendars within a calendar, like shared calendars from research labs or online applications. I have learned to schedule small blocks of time after meetings, especially project development or brainstorming meetings, during which I can write notes, look up deadlines, send emails, or any other action items that came up during the meeting while it’s still fresh in my mind. I even schedule appointments for my personal events, like hiking, movies, or buying cheese at the farmer’s market. Having them in my calendar keeps me from scheduling work-related things into my personal time. Academics, myself included, have a habit of working more than 40 hours a week: “Let me just send this email real quick” can easily transform into “Well, there went my Saturday”.
I’ve been known to schedule reminders months or a year in advance, perhaps to catch up with someone about a project, to have a certain portion of a project completed by a soft deadline, or look up a grant RFA that will be made available approximately three months from now. Making good use of my calendar has been particularly important for tracking my time for reporting (or billing) purposes. BioBE and ESBL use the Intervals tracking program, and it’s much easier to report my time if I have a detailed account of it in my calendar. Even better- it’s great for retrospective reports:
The categorical break-down of how I have spent my time from June to November.
That time has been used for a number of different projects.
Perhaps the best use of my calendar has been to schedule themed time-blocks spanning several hours, such as “catching up on projects” or “data analysis”, specifically on a shared or public calendar to prevent time fractionation. These events are marked as tentative, so I can be scheduled during those times as needed, but I find that I get fewer requests for my time when I don’t have unclaimed space on the calendar. And, I can focus on a specific project for several hours, which I prefer to a “30 min here, 60 min there” approach. If possible, I also try to concatenate meetings, seminars, training and workshops, or other short but disruptive events. One or two stand-alone events can be a nice way to break up the day, but too many can fracture my time into small blocks and make it very difficult to effectively perform the researchportion of my work which is best accomplished when I can puzzle out problems at my own pace. So, I categorize the day as “administrative”, “socialmedia“, or “project management”, and spend the day taking care of all the other responsibilities I have that are tangential (but important) to my research.
Emails
Prioritizing my emails with flags is also really helpful, especially if you can color-codebyimportance. I get dozens of emails every day, from six different email accounts, but I keep my inboxes to less than 10 items each, almost every day. I spend a few minutes to prioritize them for later, I archive old emails into other folders for future reference, and I dedicate time to deal with my emails on a daily basis. I also liberally use the “unsubscribe” link.
Academics love to work outside the office- most often because the office is where everyone goes to find you for some reason. Coffee shops, parks, airports, and homes are popular locations for “writing caves” (I’m writing this from home right now). Being in a distraction-free, or distraction-specific (i.e. white noise of cafe chatter) location helps me focus on things without interruption. When I’m analyzing data or writing up results, I have multiple computer application windows open and am collating information from multiple sources, so I need to focus or else I waste a lot of time trying to pick up where I left off after every interruption.
Monty Python
When I’m stuck on something, sometimes I’ll take a walk- usually to go get coffee. Ok, always to go get coffee. Exercise stimulates blood flow and lattes are full of glucose, so it’s a perfect way for me to recharge. Often, that change of pace is all I need to accomplish in 2 min what I was struggling to put together earlier. My best ideas often coalesce while hiking or biking home, so I started taking pens and notepaper with me so I can write them down on the fly before I forget.
When possible, I also try not to force myself to work to continue working on specific things past the point where I can make progress on it (you know, for all those times I’m not up against a deadline- haha). Of course, this flexibility in my schedule during business hours is a privilege that most people don’t enjoy. It also takes a great deal of self-motivation to enforce, but it can be very effective for me. Instead, I set that project aside and focus on something else entirely. Often, this leads to procrastinating work with other work, but it’s productive nonetheless. But for me, it also leads to more effective work-life balance. Late afternoons are not a particularly productive time for me; it’s better if I leave early and go grocery shopping, and then work for a few hours in the evening or on Saturday mornings, when I can get an extremely productive hour or two in after I’ve had time to mull things over. Having down time built into your day has been shown to improve productivity.
Conversely, when I get new data, start writing a new grant, or acquire a novel task, my interest and enthusiasm are high and I’m tempted to drop everything else to start working on it. Following that passion for a day or a week gives me a great start in which to outline what I’ll do for the next few weeks or months. Then, as my enthusiasm ebbs, my thoughts wander, and other deadlines become more pressing, I can set it aside and pick that outline up later after I’ve thought it over. Collectively, these strategies allow me to be productive without reallocating time that I would otherwise use for sleeping, and without racing against the clock to submit something.
Find a system you like and stick to it
Everyone uses different technology and productivity applications, and everyone has a different style of organization, so you may have to try different things to find a method you like. But once you find something that works for you, stick with it. Too often I see people abandon a time management strategy because they don’t have time to invest in adapting to it. Maybe you have several hundred unread emails you don’t want to sort, maybe you are having syncing issues across multiple device operating systems, or maybe you keep forgetting to use your strategy because it hasn’t become habit. I encourage you to devote time to becoming comfortable with some time management strategy, as I can personally attest that it will pay off later.
The Ishaq Lab 