Work-life balance: the unicorn that is the 40 hour academic work week

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In the first installment of the work-life balance discussion, I discussed the different levels of employment for university faculty and gave general information on the different functions they performed on a daily basis.  I also talked about how many of them work longer than 40 hours a week, including nights and weekends, and may even work summers without compensation.  For example, in a 1994 report, the American Association of University Professors reported that professors worked 48-52 hours per week, and this had increased to  53 hours by 2005.  Other sources over the past five years have reported more: 57 hours per week at a Canadian research institution, 50-60 hours per week in the UK.  But like with anything, work quantity does not equate to quality.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

For one thing, working long hours without sufficient weekly time off, or vacations, can significantly increase stress.  And this stress can lead to all sorts of different mental and physical problems.  Working long hours can interfere with our normal circadian rhythm– it can disrupt our sleep cycles, throw off our eating times and appetite, and make it difficult to exercise regularly.  Longer hours have been directly correlated with incidence of hypertension and other cardiovascular problems (also reviewed here).

Moreover, long work hours and work stress can negatively impact mental health (1, 2, 3, 4), and increase the use of legal and illegal substances (reviewed here).  A study of work hours on over 330,000 participants in 61 countries found that working more than 48 hours a week was associated with heavy drinking in both men and women.  Stress, lack of sleep, and a subsequent difficulty paying attention can also increase the frequency of injury at work, and this injury rate directly relates to the increase in hours.  Jobs with overtime hours have been associated with as much as 61% more work-related injuries than those without.  In fact, there is so much research on stress, health, and occupation, that there are numerous journals solely dedicated to reporting on those findings: The International Journal of Stress Management, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, The Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, just to name a few.

Having a life makes us better employees

But for all that personal sacrifice, mounting evidence shows that a reduction in work hours is what promotes productivity, not a 24-hour work day.  Reducing weekly hours increased productivity as employees were less likely to be absent from work due to poor health (reviewed here).  Taking scheduled breaks instead of skipping them was also responsible for improving cognitive function in students.  Even brief diversions were shown to improve focus and cognitive function. Besides giving us a rest from our current task, or engaging our attention with something novel, taking a break allows us to daydream.  While this may seem like a waste of time, letting our minds wander activates different parts of our brain- including those involved in problem solving and creative thinking.  If you’ve ever come up with a brilliant solution while doing mundane tasks, then you’ve experienced this.  For my part, I tend to think of great ideas when I’m washing dishes or biking home.  Daydreaming, or taking a break, also helps release dopamine, a chemical neurotransmitter involved in movement, emotions, motivation, and rewards.  It’s very helpful in the creative process, as explained in a discussion of creativity in the shower.  Restful thinking also seems to be involved with promoting divergent thinking, emotional connectivity, and reading comprehension.

Going on regular annual vacations was correlated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease: not only are vacations great for reducing stress, but they also provide opportunities for more exercise, mental downtime, and creative outlets.  Mandatory time-off during nights and weekends for consultants resulted in a reported increase job performance, mental health, and attitude, though many said it was a struggle to enforce “time outs” from work in the beginning because they felt guilty about not working during their personal time.  This was seen again in a study of Staples managers who did not take scheduled breaks out of guilt.

It’s this persistent feeling that you should be working at home, and that you could be doing more, which is largely reported by “driven” employees and workaholics.  This feeling has lately been coined “tele-pressure“.  It’s particularly invasive these days as you have access to work emails and other communications via smart phones, laptops, or tablets.  In fact, by syncing many of these devices, your attention is compelled by multiple simultaneous electronic signals and vibrations whenever someone contacts you.  It’s no wonder we can’t shut off at the end of the day. (And for the record, I wrote this on a Sunday evening.)

More important than knowing that taking regular breaks and vacations will help manage your stress and improve your productivity, is remembering that you are entitled to it.  We have labor laws for a reason, and you are entitled to your nights, weekends, and your X number of weeks a year.  You are entitled to stay home when you are sick, or whenever you feel like it.  It’s your personal time, take it.

So, if you’re in academia, what do you do to unwind?  Leave me some comments!

What I do for a living Part 4: Teaching

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In addition to my post-doctoral research, I also do a small amount of teaching.  Last fall, I taught the laboratory section of a course on Host-Associated Microbiomes at Montana State University.  I redesigned the lab to focus on teaching students how to process and analyze sequencing data, which they had no previous experience in.  Starting with raw data from mock samples, students had to assemble sequences into contigs, pass them through quality assurance steps, align and classify them based on a reference database of their choosing, and statistically compare diversity between samples.  This culminated in a final scientific manuscript, which presented the student’s findings and gave them experience with scientific writing.

This fall, in addition to teaching the lab section, I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll also be teaching some of the class lecture portion.  Most of that will be presenting an introduction to microbial ecology, theory, terminology, and technology.  This will give a base of knowledge for the rest of the course on microbiomes.  Scientific discovery is inextricably linked to the ability and accuracy of the technology available at the time.  To understand how we went from discovering there were microscopic organisms living in water to being able to sequence the entire genome of that organism to understand how it interacts with medications in the human body, we need to understand the technological steps in between.  That way, we can better understand how scientists worked through microbial theories of the past (like disproving Spontaneous Generation), so that we can learn how to work through the microbial theories of the present (like Hygiene Theory).

BIOM405class_9-12_SpeciesDivergence

Summary of JAM conference

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The Joint Annual Meeting brings together the American Society of Animal Science, the American Dairy Science Association, the Canadian Society of Animal Science, and this year, the Western Section of ASAS.  Or I should say, JAM did bring these together, as this was the last year that all the societies would be meeting jointly for some time.  The meetings bring together researchers, students, educators, animal producers, and animal feeds and industry together to discuss issues facing animal production and how to best solve them.

After patiently waiting for the recordings of my presentations to be made available, I find that they are not available to the public for a year!  So, here are links to the written abstracts for my presentations, and I’ll upload the videos next year.  By that time, hopefully both these projects will already have published manuscripts!

Abstract 1768.  Ground redberry juniper and urea in DDGS-based supplements do not adversely affect ewe lamb rumen microbial communities.

S.L. Ishaq, C.J. Yeoman, and T.R. Whitney. 2016.

 

Abstract 1522.  Influence of colostrum on the microbiological diversity of the developing bovine intestinal tract.

S.L. Ishaq, E. Bichi, S.K. Olivo, J. Lowe, C.J. Yeoman, and B.M. Aldridge. 2016.

 

Work-life balance: what do professors do?

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Outside the academic world, there is a lot of misconception about what faculty and university personnel actually do and when.  While this varies by position, university faculty have a variable mix of teaching, research, advising students, grant writing, administration of grant budgets and workloads for persons working in the lab, being on institutional committees (curriculum planning, graduate student committees, candidate search committees), and community outreach (presentations, generating informative publications for the general public, etc.).  As universities have sought to increase student populations while decreasing faculty, this has led to an ever-increasing number of hours spent working.

The Academic Ladder

To understand the problem with workloads, we must first understand the positions generally available.  It’s taken for granted that graduate students will work more than 40 hours per week.  Graduate teaching assistants are paid a stipend to teach a certain number of credits per semester, and generally their tuition is covered by the department they are teaching for, although this does not always include university fees and health insurance.  At the University of Vermont as a GTA, I still paid around $1,200 per semester, despite having my tuition and some of my student health insurance comped.  As a graduate research assistant, a research grant pays your stipend and, potentially, your tuition.  Either way, you are taking classes and expected to do your own research, and it is very difficult to excel at all aspects while try to only work 40 hours per week.

Post-doctoral researchers have attained their Ph.D., and are specializing in an area of research.  Often, PhDs go from post-doc position to post-doc position waiting for a professorship in their field to open up.  Depending on the positions, post-docs also have to write their own grants, and may have to teach, although this is often unpaid.  In 2005, post-docs in the US reported working an average of 51 hours per week, diluting their salary until their effective hourly pay was lower than Harvard janitorial staff.  As reported in the study, average post-doctoral salary ($38k/year) was also less than the average salary of someone working outside of academia with only a bachelor’s degree ($45k/year), and much less than those with professional degrees ($72k/year).

From there, a variety of academic positions available, but these generally fall into three tiers: assistant, associate, and (full) professor.  For example, if you are a research professor, you do not have to teach and often do not mentor students outside of your graduate students, and you can be at the level of assistant-, associate-, or (full) research professor depending on your years of experience.  These are almost always non-tenured positions, meaning you work by contract, and you often have to fund your own salary through grants.  There are also adjunct professors, as well as lecturers or instructors.  Like research professors, they perform fewer functions (generally just teaching and advising), and have short-term contracts.  Adjunct positions are part-time with no benefits, while lecturers are full-time and come with benefits, and their prevalence in research universities is increasing.

Traditional faculty positions, on the other hand, have salaries paired through the department, and are contracted for longer periods of time.  You can also be at the level of assistant, associate, or (full) professor, and you may also apply for tenure.  Tenure is a permanent contract with the university, and it is a grueling review in which all of your career moves are carefully examined by a panel of your peers.  The idea behind tenure is that once it is awarded, you cannot be fired except under special circumstances, allowing you to pursue less trendy and more daring research topics.  Tenure is not awarded lightly, and assistant (or associate) faculty spend years trying to accomplish as much as possible, such that they are driven to work longer hours. Faculty without tenure reported working an average of 56 hours per week, which is likely driven by assistant professors that reported working 56 hours per week.

All of these positions may be offered as 9 (September to May) or 12 month appointments, meaning you are only paid for working that many months.  There is a perception that faculty don’t work in the summer, and that’s because those 9 month appointments are not required to work.  However, most take the opportunity to catch up on research or generating teaching materials, and many academics report working longer hours in the summer.  While you might be awarded grant money to pay salary for the three months of summer that you spend catching up on research, many academics will end up working uncompensated just to keep up.

Responsibilities

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In a preliminary study by anthropologist Dr. John Ziker, called Time Allocation Workload Knowledge Study (TAWKS), 30 professors from Boise State University were asked to recall everything they had done over the past 24 hours.  Participants reported an average of 61 hours per week spent working, including about 10 hours on the weekend.  The breakdown of their job functions is below:

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TAWKS preliminary data, Dr. John Ziker

 

Other studies report similar findings, with an average 53 hours per week spent on all activities, and a breakdown as such:

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Link et al. 2008, Economics of Education Review

This seems to be skewed towards assistant professors:

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Link et al. 2008, Economics of Education Review

as well as non-tenured faculty:

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Link et al. 2008, Economics of Education Review

 

As I mentioned, professors are responsible for teaching, research, advising students, grant writing, administration of grant budgets and workloads for persons working in the lab, institutional committees (curriculum planning, graduate student committees, candidate search committees), and community outreach (presentations, generating informative publications for the general public, etc.).  Here is a very long list that one professor made of their responsibilities.  Enrollment in college has increased over the past few decades, but faculty hires have not kept pace: there are an average of 16 fewer staff members per 1,000 full-time students in 2012 than there was in 2000.  While the number of faculty positions in the US has increased numerically, this growth has been overwhelmingly in part-time hires, with a 121% increase from 1990 to 2012 as compared to a 41% increase in full-time hires.  The increasing number of students, expansion of faculty responsibilities, and the rise in part-time employees who often travel to multiple universities in a day for work have pushed staff and faculty to work longer hours, yet this does not always translate into better quality of work, as some work functions take priority over others over time.

In the follow-up segment, I’ll discuss the importance of time off and finding a work-life balance (as I write this on evenings and weekends), and how this contributes to reduced stress, as well as improved health, productivity, quality of work, and quality of life.

If you’re in academia, what do you do on a daily basis?  Leave me some comments!

Intellectual property and the tug of war between confidentiality and transparency

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Intellectual property (IP) is anything that you conceptualize or create: whether it is written, played, sung, viewed, or synthesized in a lab. Different countries, universities, and companies have legislation regarding intellectual property.

In academia, the IP usually belongs to the researcher, with approval of the university, and thanks to the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, universities can patent and sell IP. Since you are an employee, and the university owns the building, arranges for the electricity bill to be paid, manages your grant funds so you don’t run into accounting problems, and technically owns the equipment that you buy with grant funds, they have a stake in your work even though they don’t outright own it. This means you are free to publish anything that is true and verifiable, and both governmental funding agencies and college policy generally dictate that you have to honestly publish your results no matter the outcome. The best you can do is not publish a project, but you can’t keep anyone else from replicating your work and then publishing it.

In fact, that is where a lot of confidentiality concerns surrounding IP come into play. For example, if you are working on something, and another group publishes a similar project first, you’ve been scooped and your work is no longer novel. In the rare cases that someone stole your work, and you can prove it, the university will back you on IP rights. While competition can be fierce in many fields or work settings, outright theft of data is not common despite the widespread fear of it.

Confidentiality is a large part of academic work, but in most cases is a temporary part. You might not be able to publish a commercial lab’s proprietary procedure, but you can and are encouraged to make publicly available all your methods and all your raw data. Once you publish it in some way, your name is now tied to it, and you will have a citation credit. The availability of raw and processed data is hugely important to most fields today. Not only does it allow you to analyze your work in reference to someone else’s results, but it provides the opportunity for large-scale data mining. There are quite a few studies that downloaded and reanalyzed a large number of similar data sets in order to better compare them and gain new insights into trends, as well as drug-prediction studies that use DNA or protein sequences from other projects as models against their drug to test its ability to bind and work effectively before trying it out in the lab.

Personally, I try to be transparent about what I work on at the local scale, and a bit vague on social media until the experiment is concluded and results published. For my thesis, I opted to wait six months after the University of Vermont had accepted it to make it open access. Print copies could be ordered, but it would not yet appear online. This was because several chapters were manuscripts which had not yet been published, and once it appears in print online that is considered “published” and some journals would not want to publish it again in an identical format. I tend to be very descriptive in how I present my bioinformatic workflows, because when I was learning the trade, a methods section that played things close to the chest made it very difficult for me to understand how others had analyzed their data. Once published, though, I think it’s very important to disseminate and publicize your work as much as possible; it doesn’t do the scientific community or the general public any good if they never see it.

 

Featured image: https://fbombmedia.com/patent-patent-mobile-apps-intellectual-property/

Wrapping up summer projects

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After a hot, dry summer growing season in Montana, the samples have all been collected and the crop harvested for my project investigating wheat production under farming system (organic vs. conventional), climate change (hot or hot and dry), disease (wheat streak virus), and weed competition (cheatgrass) conditions.  We collected wheat and weed biomass from every subplot, totaling 108 bags of wheat and an estimated 500 bags of weeds!  This will be weighed to determine production, and diversity (number of different weed species) will be assessed.

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The biomass bags were temporarily stored in my office until we could find enough shelf space in the lab.

At the end of July, we also collected our final soil samples, which required over 500 grams of aseptically collected of soil in each subplot.  With the extremely dry, clay-containing soil on the farm, this was no quick undertaking, and it took 6-7 lab members a total of 9 hours to collect all 108 samples!  Those soil samples will be used for DNA sequencing to determine what microorganisms are present, and compared to other time points to see how they changed over the summer in response to our treatment conditions.  The soil will also be measured for essential nutrients, such as nitrogen and carbon content, and saved to be used in a greenhouse experiment to look at the legacy effects of microbial change.

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The samples might be collected, but we aren’t done yet.  This was year one of a two-year project, and as winter wheat and cheatgrass need to be sown soon, before it gets cold, we have a lot of prep work to do.  This includes resetting our data collection tools, including gypsum blocks for soil moisture and ibuttons for soil temperature.  We will also need to set up our climate chamber equipment in all new subplots, since we are interested in third-year winter wheat that is part of a five-year crop rotation.  We also plan to start a greenhouse experiment looking at the legacy effects of our soil this fall.  Not to mention all of data to analyze over the winter months!

Catch my upcoming presentations!

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I’m here at the Joint Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah!  JAM brings together the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS), the American Dairy Science Association (ADSA), the Western Section of the American Society of Animal Science (WSASAS), and the Canadian Society of Animal Science (CSAS).

I’ll be presenting “Influence of colostrum on the microbiological diversity of the developing bovine intestinal tract” in the Ruminant Nutrition section on Saturday morning, and “Ground redberry juniper and urea in DDGS-based supplements do not adversely affect ewe lamb rumen microbial communities” in the Small Ruminant section on Wednesday morning.

What I do for a living Part 3: Soil Ecology and Weed Management

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In May, 2016, I started a post doctoral position in a laboratory that focuses on weed management in agricultural systems, especially organic farms which don’t use chemical fertilizer or herbicide. My role is to integrate microbial ecology. For example, is the soil microorganism diversity different in fields that compete better against weeds than in fields that can’t? Are there certain microorganisms that make it easier for weeds to grow, and how do they do that? Can we suppress weeds by manipulating bacteria or fungi in the soil?

So far, I’ve been doing field work for my project, as well as assisting other lab members in their own projects, as many large scale greenhouse or field experiments require large groups of helpers to accomplish certain tasks. I’m also new to weed ecology, and I wanted to learn as much as possible. Thus, I put on some sunscreen and one of those vendor t-shirts you get when you order a certain dollar amount, and got to work.

Some of our projects investigate the link between crop health and climate change.  To simulate climate change, we create rain-out shelters to mimic dry conditions, and plastic shielding to mimic hotter conditions.

Making climate change simulators.
The gypsum block will absorb soil moisture, and we can measure conductivity off of that.
This one is very dry.

One of the treatments is to infect crops with wheat streak mosaic virus, to determine whether climate change will affect the plant’s ability to fight infection, and whether it will change soil microbiota. To do this, we needed to infect our crops, which meant growing infected plants in the laboratory and selectively spreading them in the field as a slurry.

Blended wheat.
We need to filter out the particles or they will clog the sprayer. Also pictured: Dr. Fabian Menalled.

 

A similar project is using mites as a virus transmission vector, so we attached mite-infected wheat to healthy wheat.

Kyla and I are attaching wheat to other wheat with paperclips.
We hope the wheat mite get infected.

Another project is collecting data about ground beetle diversity in organic versus conventionally farmed soil. For this, we planted pitfalls traps in fields to collect and identify beetles.

Throughout many of the ongoing lab projects, I’ll be investigating the effect of treatments on soil health and diversity.

The core sampler is used to collect soil from certain depths.
The soil is then put in sterile containers until analysis.

My project is part of a larger experiment, which also involves assessing crop and weed communities.  For this, we need to randomly sample plants in the field and collect all above-ground plant material (to measure biomass as weight), as well as the biomass of each individual weed species to measure diversity (number of different weed species) and density (how large the plants are actually growing).

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And, of course, there is plenty of weed species identification!

Field bindweed study sampling

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Field bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) is an invasive plant related to morning glories.  Their winding vines grow into a tangled mass which can strangle other plants, and a single plant can produce hundreds of seeds.  The plants can also store nutrients in the roots which allow them to regrow from fragments, thus it can be very difficult to get rid of field bindweed.  It will return even after chemical or physical control (tilling or livestock grazing), but it does not tolerate shade very well.  Thus, a more competitive crop, such as a taller wheat which will shade out nearby shorter plants, reduce the viability of bindweed.

Bindweed wraps around other plants.
This patch goes all the way to Lazarro.
First seen in the US in 1739, Field bindweed is native to the Mediterranean. By 1891, it had made its way west and was identified in Missoula, Montana.  As of 2016, it has been reported from all but two counties in Montana, where it has been deemed “noxious” by the state department (meaning that it has been designated as harmful to agriculture (or public health, wildlife, property).  In the field, this can be visually striking, as pictured below.  In the foreground, MSU graduate student Tessa Scott (lead researcher on this project) is standing in a patch of wheat infested with bindweed. Just seven feet away in the background, undergraduate Lazarro Vinola is standing in non-infested wheat, with soil core samplers used for height reference.
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In agricultural fields, bindweed infestations severely inhibit crop growth and health.

 

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Last week, Tessa, Lazarro, and I went to several farms in and around Big Sandy and Lewistown, Montana in order to sample fields battling field bindweed. To do so, we harvested wheat, field bindweed, and other weed biomass by cutting all above-ground plant material inside a harvesting frame.  These will be dried and weighed, to measure infestation load and the effect on wheat production.

The sampling locations are consistent with previous years to track how different farm management practices influence infestations.  This means using GPS coordinates to hike out to spots in the middle of large fields.

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It also means getting very dirty driving and walking through dusty fields!

Thalspi, or pennycress, which is dropping seeds even in my shoes!
The van did very well on rocky, uneven field roads!

Manuscript published on the effect of low/high fat diets on health and intestinal bacteria

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Several years ago, during my Ph.D. at the University of Vermont, I provided wet-lab and DNA sequence analysis work for a project investigating the health effects of a low or high fat diet on mice with Dr. Huawei Zeng of the USDA Agricultural Research Service.  It was just recently published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry!

Abstract

Consumption of an obesigenic/high-fat diet (HFD) is associated with a high colon cancer risk and may alter the gut microbiota. To test the hypothesis that long-term high-fat (HF) feeding accelerates inflammatory process and changes gut microbiome composition, C57BL/6 mice were fed HFD (45% energy) or a low-fat (LF) diet (10% energy) for 36 weeks. At the end of the study, body weights in the HF group were 35% greater than those in the LF group. These changes were associated with dramatic increases in body fat composition, inflammatory cell infiltration, inducible nitric oxide synthase protein concentration and cell proliferation marker (Ki67) in ileum and colon. Similarly, β-catenin expression was increased in colon (but not ileum). Consistent with gut inflammation phenotype, we also found that plasma leptin, interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor α concentrations were also elevated in mice fed the HFD, indicative of chronic inflammation. Fecal DNA was extracted and the V1–V3 hypervariable region of the microbial 16S rRNA gene was amplified using primers suitable for 454 pyrosequencing. Compared to the LF group, the HF group had high proportions of bacteria from the family Lachnospiraceae/Streptococcaceae, which is known to be involved in the development of metabolic disorders, diabetes and colon cancer. Taken together, our data demonstrate, for the first time, that long-term HF consumption not only increases inflammatory status but also accompanies an increase of colonic β-catenin signaling and Lachnospiraceae/Streptococcaceae bacteria in the hind gut of C57BL/6 mice.