As the lab finishes its 4th year of existence, I’m realizing that the older lab photos are going to eventually overwhelm the “personnel” page, but I still want to save them for posterity. Thus, I’ll start only keeping the most recent lab photos on the personnel page, while transferring older photos to this blog post.

Here’s the history of lab photos for the Matreyek and Bruchez labs, from (almost the) most recent to oldest:

Back in 2017, when I was a postdoc and still first learning the human genetics field, I encountered a clinically relevant situation in my own family’s genetics. In short, my bloodline seemed to harbor a quite rare recessive allele in a gene encoding the “battery pack” for a set of critical hormone (and other small molecule) modifying / metabolizing enzymes. When two dysfunctional copies are harbored in the same individual, there are devastating consequences on the developing child.

Figuring this out ended up being an interesting academic exercise, since it was a case where I could synthesize a lot of the knowledge I had built up, from more recently acquired knowledge in human genetics, clinical genetics, genomic technologies, and genomic databases, to somewhat older knowledge I had on literature searches, molecular biology, cell biology, and protein structure-function. Here’s a report I had provided a family member upon embarking on my quest to understand the situation. Aside from my family, I had directly shared it with various friends / colleagues / trainees over the years, but a recent conversation with people in the lab made me realize that I may as well share it more broadly at this point (any lingering minor concerns about publicly sharing “private” health-related information – for both me and at least some of my family members – is offset by what I think is a nice case-study of the importance of science and genetics on understanding human disease.

Note: In the process of having Avery, we did get Anna tested, and she was not a carrier for any variants in POR thus making Avery’s risk of ABS essentially zero (rather than the number I had calculated at the end of the above document). That said, I remember that getting Anna tested was somewhat of a struggle, between it not being fully covered under insurance and there being some miscommunication between our hospital system and the external genetic testing lab, such that the test results were pretty delayed. Such is the US health care system…

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):