I’ve now been an author on enough papers to have a reasonable sampling of what the experiences can be like. In short, it minimally takes 2 months to go from initial submission to eventual manuscript acceptance. These experiences typically are those that require little to no experiments for revision. The process, especially when requiring hefty experiments or multiple rounds of revision, can easily stretch to half a year. In some cases it can take *much* longer (in one experience I’ve seen, a journal did the “rejected but amenable to resubmission if sufficient additional impact is added”, which resulted in an informal span of ~ 800 days!!! ). Anyway, at least for the manuscript submissions I was involved with where I had access to an author portal (or received emails when things happened), I noted when the reviews were returned and revisions submitted, to also keep track of how much of that time was technically under one’s control (manuscript with authors; red) or completely out of one’s control (manuscript with journal; blue). See below:

Also, part of the reason it makes sense to post manuscripts to bioRxiv; why have a completed manuscript that is essentially publication-worthy sit in the dark for half a year?

Note: Obviously this data is for manuscripts that eventually got accepted. Rather pleasantly, I’ve never been first or corresponding author for a paper that got rejected, so I don’t have nearly as good a sampling of that experience. But sitting on the sideline as a middle-author for a handful of such occasions, it would seem to take anywhere between a week (eg. immediate desk rejection) to a couple of months (eg. rejected upon peer review) per submission; when sequentially shopping across multiple journals to find a taker, this would seem to add up.

At least in my SOM-based department, one’s general status is supposedly correlated with the amount of indirect costs they bring in. It looks like I’m currently capped at 4 desks for my personnel, and it’s not clear if it’s worth trying to expand here. Regardless, this is apparently the directs / indirects space I’m operating in with my current setup.

What does this come out to in terms of indirect costs generated per month? Here’s the plot based on my budget reports, below:

Ah, the business of SOM-based academic research. Well, I’m nothing if not transparent.

Rather facetiously got a suggestion to keep track of how my workdays are spent, but that did prompt me to start keeping track since I have gotten into the phase of my job where I’m feeling somewhat burdened by non-research responsibilities and I like having data in hand. As I’ve noted on my other website, my workdays are now largely constrained by daycare hours. Thus, I do have pretty limited hours in a day to get everything done, requiring a fair amount prioritization; doing one things often means not doing something else.

I’ll sporadically hit “run” on my analysis script and the below plot will update. The n values are currently pretty small, but I plan to keep doing this indefinitely.

Keys for the above plot:
Red dashes are mean values across all days. Gray dots are values for individual days.
“Research_internal” denotes activities that directly impact my research group (eg. meetings with personnel, data analysis, benchwork).
“Research_external” denotes research activities that don’t have to do with my group (eg. Science-centric meetings with other faculty, emails to people requesting reagents).
“Administrative_internal” denotes general paperwork (eg. Filling out my annual performance reviews)
“Seminar_director” denotes work related to running the immunology portion of the Dept seminar series (eg. More emails…)
“Postdoc_affairs” denotes work related to trying to manage postdoc affairs for the dept (and in some ways, by extension, the SOM).
“Other_service” denotes other service activities for the school (eg. Corresponding with CWRU undergrads not in my group).

But I can break down some of these activities further. For example, for the the “Research_internal” section where I’m handling things directly related to my research lab, it can be further broken down as follows:

And, well, since so much time seems to be spent writing emails nowadays, this how much time I spend writing emails each day (note: I do all internal communication with lab members via Slack, so this is mostly administrative matters):

Kind of an interesting observation, so I figured I’d post it.

Now that I’ve been here a little while and have gotten some research grants funded, I was curious how my research group was faring from the University’s finances perspective. Now of course this is going to be a gross oversimplification, but I figured a simple metric was taking the amount of money the University has gotten as indirects from my research grants (61% indirects rate; you can figure this out through a simple Google search), and subtract that by the amount of startup funds I’ve spent so far (note: this isn’t all the startup funds I have available; just what I’ve spent so far and is thus officially “gone”). Well, here’s what that looks like over the last two years:

My first pass at trying to analyze this data was incorrect, since my budget reports only list the total money spent (which includes directs and indirects), so I had to go back and extrapolate the direct and indirect funds out of that number for each budget number (with there being three classes: startup accounts with no indirects, the K award with 8% indirects, and the R awards with 61% indirects). So in actuality, I have not yet accrued more indirects than startup funds expended, although I do know that for the last 6 months I’ve been funded 100% off my NIH grants (I haven’t been spending my startup at all), so presumably the trend will keep trending toward the positive.

I’m now in charge of running a decent chunk of the departmental seminars. Thus, it’s behooved me to figure out how to handle the A/V in that room as well, since I don’t want seminars ruined by technical problems. So here are my notes for handling them:

Initial lighting: Preset 2 makes sense for people first walking in. That said, if that seems too dark for the stage, then the full “on” position is fine (preset 1 on the elevator-side panel, or just “on” in the main entrance panel).

I’m going to suggest using your own laptop. The computer there is fine (you’ll have to log in using your Case ID and passphrase) but I still think it’s going to go way smoother with your own laptop. I’m going to suggest any time I’m in control, that we use the “MatreyekLab” laptop for this.

Use the touchpad on the right to wake the projector. Then, click on “Laptop” so that it knows to use the external VGA (which, I’m assuming, usually has the HDMI adapter plugged into it). Note: The cord is *very* finnicky. Like, don’t touch the cord at all, or leave it in a position where it may hang a bit. I’ve tried to tighten it as much as possible, and that seems to keep it somewhat resistant to disconnecting, at least for a while).

If you want to have presenter tools, you’ll have to be in “Extended Desktop” mode. For the LCD_VGA projector, make sure it is in 720p mode or else it may look awful. No underscanning necessary. This is all when on a Mac. To get access to those settings, go to “System Preferences” > “Displays”.

The mic electronics should be on by default, but there is a “on / off” switch at the base on the mic. Once that light comes on, you know it’s on. I haven’t been able to find a volume knob for it or anything. Probably makes sense to just turn it away if it is too loud.

What I like to do, is to have my personal laptop log in as my actual Case Zoom account (the one where I’m presumably host or co-host). After the meeting is started / set, using the Meeting ID and Password, I log into Zoom as a “guest” user on the MatreyekLab laptop. Once logged in, don’t forget to rename yourself to be “Speaker” or whoever the actual speaker’s name is, to make it clear which Zoom window is actually the presenter. Then, using the personal laptop with the host account, make the “Speaker” account a co-host (for this session), so they can easily share their screen. I then just share my screen, and use “Desktop 2” as the screen being shared, and it should be more-or-less set.

I have found that while the built in mic can be OK for this, a cheap $30 mic off Amazon may give you better sound for the speaker’s voice, and help pick up on the sound from audience questions as well. Probably makes sense to at least move the Zoom bar on the presenting computer away from the top, since it’s going to obscure the slide titles. Even better if you change the settings in Zoom (on the presenter computer, not on the personal laptop) to get rid of the floating Zoom bar, so that it doesn’t start taking up a bunch of slide space when people start asking questions

I can monitor how things look and sound from my main laptop, although there is a half-second lag between the real-life voice and the captured voice transmitted through Zoom, so it’s only possible to check in on the sound periodically for short amounts of time.

When ready to start, I find this to be easiest order of events.
1. Go up to the podium. On Zoom, turn the speaker laptop off mute. Go to more > “Hide floating meeting controls”.
2. Turn on the microphone for the seminar room so people in the back can hear.
3. Go to the control panel on the stage and set the lighting to 4, which will dim the lights in the room.
4. Start talking!

Finishing up: Probably makes sense to go back to Lighting preset #2 during Q&A, so people can see each other talking easier.