Interesting Features at PWN for 5.25.15

News from the PWN Pipeline:

#girlswithtoys

The hashtag 'girls with toys' has roared into Twitter as women in the international scientific community have posted tweets with photos of themselves with their scientific toys, ranging from Mars Rovers to the Hadron Collider. The images, all including the #girlswithtoys hashtag, are a response to a remark made by astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni from the California Institute of Technology to NPR's Joe Palca who was interviewing him: "Many scientists, I think, are what I call 'boys with toys.'" This chauvinistic view of STEM fields undermines the many contributions of women scientists. Fortunately, the images of scientific tools that many women scientists are now posting online offers a glimpse into their cool toys and may help inspire young girls to enter STEM fields.

Check out some #girlswithtoys tweets here


Advancement Opportunities

Postdoctoral position available in the Behavioral Neurophysiology Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA

Tremendous opportunity for a highly motivated electrophysiologist who is interested in learned behavioral models, particularly investigating synaptic plasticity underlying cocaine addiction and relapse using rodent models. The successful candidate must have published proficiency in whole-cell slice electrophysiology and synaptic plasticity, and the ability to measure glutamatergic plasticity in brain slices using whole-cell patch-clamp recording is required. Furthermore, the successful candidate will have a PhD degree in neuroscience or related filed, strong communication skills, a strong publication history, and a desire to work both independently and cooperatively.

Interested applicants: CV | Cover Letter | names of 3 references
Send to: Dr. Lisa Briand | lbriand@temple.edu

Interesting Features at PWN for 5.11.15

News from the PWN Pipeline: 

Medical Researchers Still Skip Gender-Based Data

In 1991, Dr. Bernadine Healy, the first female director of the National Institutes of Health, reported the troubling news that women who had heart attacks were receiving a different quality of care as men because they presented with different symptoms that often resulted in misdiagnosis or improper treatment. Part of the reason for this difference in care is that women are not routinely involved in clinical trials and therefore treatments are often designed based on how male clinical trial participants reacted to specific drugs, leading to errant dosing and treatment of women. Genetic differences in drug treatment reactivity are a critical factor in determining the success of a potential drug, and reflect a key reason to mandate the inclusion of women and minorities in drug testing and clinical trials. Decades after Dr. Healy first spoke out on this issue, Senator Dianne Feinstein has recently asked the Government Accountability Office to ensure that women are included in clinical trials and her efforts led to an NIH policy change to include more women in these trials.


Advancement Opportunities

Postdoctoral position available at the Department of Anesthesia at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA

Exciting opportunity for a scientist interesting in studying mechanisms underlying the genesis of migraine and post-traumatic headaches. The NIH funded project involves in vivo recording from trigeminal nocicepters in rodents together with the use of optogenetic and chemogenetic methods. The successful applicant will have a PhD in neuroscience, pharmacology or physiology, and extensive in vivo extracellular electrophysiology experience. Knowledge of immunohistochemistry is also preferred.

Interested applicants: CV | 1-page description of career goals | contact info for 3 references
Send to: Dr. Dan Levy | dlevy1@bidmc.harvard.edu

Interesting Features at PWN for 4.4.15

News from the PWN Pipeline:

10 Things Not to Say at Work

Tara Sophia Mohr, career coach and founder of the Playing Big women's leadership program, suggests eliminating 10 common words and phrases from daily workplace speech in order to make thoughts and statements more powerful. Among these suggestions is dropping the word 'just' ("I just want to check in..." "I'm just concerned that...") that can make the speaker sound whiny and dropping undermining qualifiers such as "I'm no expert, but..." or ""I'm just thinking off the top of my head..." which combines both 'just' and an undermining qualifier. Click the link above to check out all of Mohr's tips.

"Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster than female doctoral students."

Among other patronizing and sexist comments, an anonymous peer reviewer of the open access journal PLoS One suggested that the two female authors of a manuscript describing the influence of gender differences on the transition between doctoral and postdoctoral work would benefit by adding male coauthors to ensure that their data were interpreted correctly. The reviewer also commented that only males have the personality and traits necessary to make it to the top jobs in science. The manuscript was ultimately rejected by PLoS One, although the national attention garnered by the sexist review has resulted in an appeal at the journal. It is remarkable that a manuscript describing data that supports ongoing gender bias in academia should yield such unconstructive and gender biased criticism.