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Four exciting postdocs in Ecology and Evolution at Washington University in St. Louis!

Looking for a postdoc? We have plenty!

Sometimes it isn’t just the project that attracts a postdo to a lab but it is the community. It isn’t easy to tell what that community is like sometimes, so here we share. Four of us are looking for postdocs in EEB at Wash U! We already have quite a few postdocs that this new cohort will be joining. It should be fun. Find what you love from the labs of Michael Landis, Rachel Penczykowski, Liz…

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Postdoctoral positions available in our lab!

The postdoc can be an amazing period in your career if you are given the flexibility to pursue your own ideas under the broader envelope of what your host has funded. You want a postdoc in a collegial lab that supports you well in this all-important time between grad school and your own lab, whether it be in academia or industry. It is important to choose the subject matter of your postdoc…

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How can you go wrong with a gap year?

Wondering about the pros and cons of stepping off the career ladder after graduating? This may help.

There are no years off from life, but maybe a break in a relentless path to a career is a good idea. It depends on what you want to get out of it. You might have been away from home too long and want to go back and watch your younger siblings shine in high school athletics. You might have a family member that needs a little care from you. You might want to learn your family recipes more…

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Advising undergraduates: encourage them to get to know themselves

What do you really want to get out of a professor that does not know you at all but does know the curriculum, in my case, for the biology major and various specialties therein? Of course you want to be sure you are fulfilling the requirements. But that is technical and easy. We professors have so much more to offer. After all, we have figured out how to shine at a career we love. What I want for…

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Did you join Mastodon yet?

Did you join Mastodon yet?

I recently joined <a href="http://<a rel="me" href="https://ecoevo.social/@joanstrassmann">MastodonMastodon and there is this thing called verification and this is me doing it.

[strassmann]

Is there a book you want to write?

Did you ever think of writing a book?

Writing a book is overwhelming to contemplate and enormously satisfying to complete. How did I find the time? First, it was a book I have been wanting to write for more than 20 years, so the time it took was a pleasure, mostly. I decided that I was writing a book as a side project and that my students should always come first. I use a productivity app sometimes. On it I put the book for an hour…

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What I learned from reading my book aloud

What I learned from reading my book aloud

There is a difference between written and spoken language that is hard to define. I think there is less of a difference in English than in some languages, but it still exists. To make your writing clear, I think that the closer you can come to spoken English with your written English the better. Your writing will sound fresher, more engaging. It will be clearer, easier to follow. It will be more…

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Retraction with honor

On July 2, 2022, we retracted a paper we published last year in Evolution https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.14551. The reason I wanted to write this post is to explain what happened and how we dealt with it and thereby to help normalize honest retractions which should probably be more common. I’ll give a little detail on the experiment and then focus on the human side. The…

[strassmann]

Ten steps to optimizing learning at large conferences

Ten steps to optimizing learning at large conferences

Active conference attendance can make all the difference in how much you learn at a large meeting with a blizzard of overlapping sessions, posters, and eating venues. A few steps before, during and after can help you get the most out of a large in-person meeting. These comments are all about attending the meeting and not about giving your own best poster or talk. Great to see Erika Noll again…

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Do not love your writing

Do not love your writing

Barred Owl in Ruth Park Woods I paused in the piece I am writing about Ruth Park Woods, a scrap of forest only 23 acres large along a fetid creek and behind small businesses of Olive Boulevard. There was a paragraph I particularly liked but it was not fitting as I developed my ideas. Still I loved the way it sounded so I struggled to fit it in. And then I remembered. Do not love your writing.…

[strassmann]

What have you discovered?

What have you discovered?

[strassmann]

An easy productivity tip: don't stop at a stopping place

An easy productivity tip: don’t stop at a stopping place

You know the feeling. Four ideas are juggling in your brain and you need to get them down on paper. They shift around as you struggle for the best order, put in transitions, and write your paragraphs. After all, you want your reader to experience the material just as you did and this is hard. But at last you are done. Your ideas are pinned down and your brain can relax. You stretch, look at your…

[strassmann]

Please join the American Association for the Advancement of Science for secret reason in addition to the main one

Please join the American Association for the Advancement of Science for secret reason in addition to the main one

Congratulations to all the new fellows of AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science! Those from Wash U were honored with nice write-ups in the Wash U Record. Here is a list of all of them. It is a wonderful thing to receive this honor, this recognition of decades, or at least a decade, of hard work in your scientific discipline!

In these troubled times, there are many of us…

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In on-line teaching one thing is essential Of all the preparations with Canvas and Zoom, in all the discussions with my Teaching Assistants, in reading the blizzard of emails my anxious university sends out, there is one thing I keep remembering from my son's long experience with on-line learning.

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Why we fail at hiring Black faculty in biology departments Today was a day of reflection. How have we gotten to this sorry point in the history of the US?

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Fishy pasta sauce We are fortunate to be sheltering in place with an old friend and Clark Way Harrison visiting professor from Italy, so instead of adding to the excellent advice about Zoom and other tricks of distance teaching, I will be sharing recipes and philosophies of cooking.

[strassmann]

Best updates on the new corona virus (#coronavirus, #covid19, #SARSCoV2) are on Twitter: a brief tutorial

Best updates on the new corona virus (#coronavirus, #covid19, #SARSCoV2) are on Twitter: a brief tutorial

Want to see a phylogeny of #covid-19? Follow @nextstrain. Want to hear what a Harvard epidemiologist thinks? Follow @mlipsitch.  Want a thoughtful microbiologist’s perspective? Follow @RELenski. What to know the latest advice from the World Health Organization? Follow @WHO. Want more general advice? Search various hashtags in Twitter, like #coronaoutbreak, #coronavirus, #SARSC0V2, or #covid19.

Th…