Resources
Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity resources
Imposter Syndrome and Mental Health Resources
- Impostor Syndrome and You: A Discussion of a Little-Discussed Phenomenon published in Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions, an American Phytopathological Society Journal
- Dr. Lowe-Power’s open letter about living with Anxiety and Depression as a scientist
- UC Davis has Therapists who serve as bridges to help navigate acute and chronic mental health:
- Academic and Staff Assistance Program for graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and other UC Davis employees.
- Counseling Services through Graduate Studies – a second resource for graduate students.
Building inclusion
- How LGBT+ scientists would like to be included and welcomed in STEM workplaces. Highly recommended reading for examples of how to welcome and build inclusion for marginalized scientists.
- Dr. Beronda Montgomery’s Keynote Talk for #BlackInMicrobiology week 2020. An excellent presentation and Q&A to watch to understand the importance of an inclusive climate and mentoring and for wisdom about developing your academic path. 1 hr and worth it.
Avoiding Implicit Bias in reading & writing Letters of Recommendation
- Avoiding racial bias
- Avoiding gender bias
- Materials to host 1 hr workshop on implicit bias in letters of recommendation
Resources for Faculty
- UC Davis STEM Faculty Resource Guide - For Faculty Starting to Learn about Equity, Inclusion, Justice and Anti Racism
- Rubrics for departmental self-assessments:
- From American Astronomical Society (Rubric begins on page 63 of the report)
- From American Institute of Physics (Appendix 8 in the Task Force Report)
- Funding opportunities for graduate fellowships to support underrepresented trainees
Science resources
Experimental (Methods, training resources, etc)
The Philosophy in PhD
- iBiology’s Let’s Experiment. A self-paced online class (5 weeks; ~3 hrs / week) that will give concrete steps and advice to help you build a framework for how to design experiments in biological research.
Data Visualization & Presentation Resources
- An assortment of Tiffany’s tips & tricks for visual presentations using ppt and illustrator. Download here
- Scientific illustration resource: Margaret Senior Plant Disease Bulletins
- Plant Illustrations Figshare Group
- BioRender platform for biological figure design Note: The free version exports with watermarks.
Bioinformatics
- Stratton’s bioinformatics course webpage with useful bioinformatics information, articles, databases, etc. compiled and created by Dr. Edward Marcotte of UT–Austin
Career / professional development resources
- Tool: The most intuitive meeting scheduling tool www.when2meet.com
- Article: ‘Growth Mindset’ vs ‘Fixed Mindset’. Adopting a growth mindset might improve your resilience to the imposter syndrome.
- Article: Tips for PhD students & early career researchers
- Article: The quest for postdoctoral independence: How to step out from the shadow of your principal investigator
- Resource: Writing letters of recommendation with less implicit bias.
Science Communication (#SciComm) Resources
Tiffany’s Advice for Grant and Paper writing (Currently down, but will be uploaded at a new location after Fall 2020)
Curated from diverse sources that are hopefully cited properly.
- Lecture 1: The Human Context of Grantsmanship
- Lecture 2: High Impact Writing (Word Choice)
- Lecture 3: High Impact Writing: Building Sentences
- Lecture 4: Writing Strategies
Stats and Data Visualization
- Same Stats, Different Graphs: Generating Datasets with Varied Appearance and Identical Statistics through Simulated Annealing
- “If your P value looks too good to be true, it probably is: Communicating reproducibility and variability in cell biology”. A humorous guide to common pitfalls in statistical analysis. The PDF is in the upper right corner. This guide was also published in a journal, but the editor removed the jokes.
- Graphpad Prism’s guide to statistics. Google for this and find the recent version. This guide is written for research biologists and uses a lot of common examples that we are familiar with. It will help you verify that your data fit the assumptions for the statistcal tests that you want to perform.
Scientific Writing
- Bacterial genetics: A how-to guide to notation on naming bacterial genotypes and phenotypes by Tiffany Lowe-Power
- Getting started: An Ode to the Shitty First Draft by Angely Mercado.
- Revising and improving: Effective and High Impact Writing (pdf) handout from ASM workshop led by Dr. Susan Marriott and Dr. Sonia Morgan-Linnell. This will help you diagnose ‘bad writing’ and revise your writing.
- Revising and improving: Science of scientific writing (pdf) by George Dopen and Judith Swan
- Abstracts: Annotated example of how to write an abstract (aka Summary)
Grant Writing
- Advice on applying for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Webinar by Kelsey Wood. (Released in 2020, so details will change. But Kelsey provides timeless advice about the program)
- Advice for a Strong NSF Standard proposal by Caitilyn Allen
- The Human Context of Granstsmanship 1 hr lecture by Tiffany Lowe-Power with materials adapted from Gary Roberts and JD Sauer at UW-Madison and John Boothroyd at Stanford.
Writing Letters of recommendation
Peer-Review
- Peer-Reviewing Scientific Manuscripts by Caitilyn Allen
Conferences / Talks / Posters
Abstracts
- Why and how to write abstracts for conferences by David Gadoury
Talks
- Guide to preparing a research talk by Luis Pedro Coelho
Posters
- Guides to printing scientific posters on wrinkle-free cloth through Spoonflower.com. Guide 1 and Guide 2. Plan for 10 business for printing & shipping.
- Better Poster Blog. Although I don’t perfectly agree with this authors’ opinions, they have suggestions on how to improve scientific poster design.