Resources
General Advice for Navigating the Hidden Curriculum of Academia
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.
- Compilation of published DEI studies and guidelines; compiled by WISELI at UW-Madison
Avoiding/confronting Implicit Bias
- Beginner’s guide to confronting implicit bias by Victoria Alexandria
- Avoiding racial bias in reading & writing Letters of Recommendation from Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, who has more equity resources on her website
- Avoiding gender bias in reading & writing Letters of Recommendation
- 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
- Anti-Racism Resources from the American Phytopathological Society
Science resources
Experimental (Methods, training resources, etc)
- Lowe-Power lab protocols
- 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, Stats, & 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.
- Same Stats, Different Graphs: Generating Datasets with Varied Appearance and Identical Statistics through Simulated Annealing
- Why scientists need to be better at data visualization
- “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.
- Color palletes inspired by works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. By Blake Mills
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
Science Communication (#SciComm) Resources
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.
- Curated from diverse sources that are hopefully cited properly.
- Tiffany’s Advice for Grant and Paper writing (Currently down, but will be uploaded at a new location after Fall 2020)
- 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
Peer-Review
- Peer-Reviewing Scientific Manuscripts by Caitilyn Allen
Conferences
- Why and how to write abstracts for conferences by David Gadoury
- Advice on how to get the most out of a conference and maintain your sanity
Talks
- Workshop on Scientific Talks by Dan Larremore
- Guide to preparing a research talk by Luis Pedro Coelho
- Science commmunication through typography. Twitter thread by Matt Carter
- Communication with color. Twitter thread by Matt Carter
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.
Stats and Data Visualization
(see section above)
Teaching
Scientific Teaching
- Repository of Plant Pathology papers that are well-suited to classroom teaching
- UC Davis Center for Educational Effectiveness has a repository of books on effective teaching. UC Davis folks can log in and read them for free. Most are pretty cheap used on Amazon if you want a hard copy.