A sense of community

Last week, Stephen Heard wrote a post about being paid for peer review that generated a lot of discussion on Twitter. A fair number of people were quite emphatic that they were not being paid, and a few seemed very grumpy about that.

Earlier in my career, I remember people complaining about the individual reviews they got, or how long reviews took. But I don’t remember people grumbling over doing reviews, or not being compensated for them. And I never heard complaints from editors about how many people were refusing to do reviews.

Now, I suspect part of this is just a shift in perspective. I hear more voices via social media than I did before, and hear more perspectives. I know people who are on editorial board on Twitter, which I didn’t before. Still, from my perspective, it feels like grumpiness over having to do peer review is a relatively recent thing.

It seemed to me that annoyance about doing reviews might be symptomatic of researchers having a degraded sense of community.

When you feel like you belong to a community, you just pitch in. You help. Not because you are paid to do so, but because it’s friends and neighbours and it’s just what you do to make your community a nice place to be.

I think people are refusing to do reviews in part because they don’t feel connected to the academic community. And I get why that would be: it’s a rough, competitive market for ideas now. The shortages in funds and jobs and everything else feels like it’s forcing people into a “me first, me only” mindset to try to survive.

People will complain about journals more when they don’t feel they those journals are part of their scientific community. Maybe this is why many academics have continued to support society journals, even as more and more of them get run by one of the big main “for profit” publishers.

I have been thinking a lot about community, too, because of things like university administration. This tweet went out last week, reading in part:

@utrgv President Bailey looks to create PhD in Cellular, Molecular & Biomedical Sciences.

Yeah, neither faculty nor students asked for that program. It certainly doesn’t make me feel part of a community in my own institution.

Same with graduate programs. I’ve seen some research that one of the biggest predictors of successful programs is that graduate students feel a sense of belonging. That is, of community. And while I tried to create that feeling in our graduate program, I have come to the conclusion I have failed.

This is one reason why science Twitter and the science online community has been important to me: because it truly does seem like a community. People offer ideas and support, for no reason, just because. Someone came up with the term “pocket friends,” which I think is a good phrasing. I’ve said to a lot of people that online conversations are real conversations. And online friends are real friends.

Update, 29 August 2017: This post was featured in today’s Daily Briefing in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thanks to them!

Update, 30 August 2017: Mike Taylor has a response.

External links

Can we stop saying reviewers are unpaid?

Picture from here.

Responses from scientific societies on fighting for science

This has been a long week.

It started Monday, with the news of the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) being instructed to freeze its grants and stop talking to anyone. And it just escalated, with more agencies getting gag orders, national parks Twitter accounts going viral for tweeting objective scientific facts, the Chair of the House Science committee saying people should get facts from administration and not the media (for double irony, this person is on the caucus for freedom of the press), possible changes to H1B visas that are a staple of many university hiring programs (I had an H1B), and on and on.

And that’s just the stuff that is kind of science related.

Monday night, I said I wanted my scientific professional societies to be ready to fight, like they have never fought before, to defend science. This goes way beyond the usual, “Keep funding coming to science!”, which is important but still kind of self-serving. When you have people literally arguing over whether there are such things as “alternative facts”... the scientific norms of demanding evidence and respecting claims supported by evidence are under so much fire, it is not clear if the scientific enterprise in America will survive, let alone continue to lead the world.

But I digress.

I wanted to report back on my efforts to contact my scientific societies, which I did Tuesday. As of the end of this week, I’ve heard back from most I contacted. I am not identifying the individual societies, but wanted to give an idea of the tone.

• “Policy engagement in light of recent events is already on our agenda.”
• “We are a voice and will raise the level significantly.”
• “I think we have all seen these shocking events. ... I know we want to be poised to respond to this kind of thing in a timely manner, but the timing of any response is important.”
• “We have a number of activities in the works over the coming weeks and months, including opportunities for you to reach out to your elected officials to promote the importance of supporting scientific research.”(A bit form-letterish, but okay.)
• Presenting new scientific results to media and general public without being muzzled is an important part of the scientific process and progress. And this is a principle that (the society) stands behind. Facts are facts. ... On the other hand, apparently this kind of policy restrictions have however been imposed before(.) So we will follow the situation. At the moment it is hard to know exactly what to do.
• One society replied that it is registered as an organization in the US, and that registration means it is “specifically prohibited from partisan political activity.” (However disappointing this may be, it is honest and understandable.)

Out of six societies who replied, I would call it as four responses were positive, one tentative, and one honest case of abstention.

My experience was not unique. Others reported their societies responded positively. Additionally, the Ecological Society of America – somewhat to my surprise – released an open letter to the president.

As a representative of over 10,000 ecological scientists, we ask you to protect the scientific integrity and independence of federal scientists.

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology issued a brief statement. This is the whole thing:

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology believes that peer-reviewed science should remain free of politicization, and we support the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and all federally funded scientific agencies in their efforts to continue on their missions without political interference.

The Society for Neuroscience sent this to me inbox as part of its email newsletter:

SfN is firmly committed to the free exchange of ideas and information, diversity, and global collaboration in all fields of science. The Society will continue to be a forceful advocate for neuroscience by informing government leaders and the public about the need for robust science funding and its positive impact on the nation’s health and economy.

SfN advocacy has sometimes looked self-interested in bad ways. I hope the society realizes that this is not a time for, “The NIH funds most of our research, and NIH haven’t been affected, so we’re fine.”

Overall, this is a good start. I worry, though, that scientific societies may be too conservative (irony!) in their approach. When you’re in the fight of your life, you can’t pull punches.

Related posts

The political attack on science escalates with EPA granting freeze
Asking scientific societies to show some backbone

External links

Agriculture Dept. lifts gag order: report
Scientists must fight for the facts
House Science Committee chairman: Americans should get news from Trump, not media
H-1B visa program faces uncertain future in Trump era
Society for Neuroscience quashing dissent on BRAIN Initiative, critic complains
The Donald Trump War on Science: Scholarly and Professional Society Statements in Support of Open Science Communications

Setting an agenda

Despite the title, committee chairs don’t have all that much power, particularly in academia. The whole point of having committees is that committees vote, and responsibility is diffused.

Committee chairs do have one actual power: to set an agenda.

I’m only a few days into my term as chair of the Student and Post-doc affairs committee at SICB, but I just want it to be known publicly that preventing sexual harassment of students and trainees has jumped to the top of the agenda.

This went to the top this morning when I opened my Twitter feed and saw, over and over, people discussing this article in the New York Times about an individual who harassed students at multiple institutions. This comes on the heels of other examples in recent months. This blog post could easily turn into a litany of harassment, so let’s just say this: there’s too much of that crap going on.

I don’t know whether harassment has been a topic of conversation for the committee before, but I look forward to finding out. If it hasn’t, it’ll be new. If it has, I plan to keep it front and center.

And I’m blogging this because I want to be accountable. I want people to know that this is what I want to try to do, so they can see if I succeed or not.

Related posts

Okay, SICB students and post-docs, I’m your guy

External links

Chicago professor resigns amid sexual misconduct investigation
Here’s how Geoff Marcy’s sexual harassment went on for decades
Work in progress: changing academic culture
You are worthy.

Photo by A Syn on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license

Okay, SICB students and post-docs, I’m your guy

I knew this was coming, but I just got the official email.

I am writing to appoint you as Chair of the Student & Postdoctoral Affairs Committee within the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Your appointment will be for three years, starting immediately and running until the end of the annual meeting in January of 2019.

I had been approached about this back before the last SICB meeting in Portland. I thought a very, very long time before stepping up and accepting this.

I was extremely hesitant about being another old white guy in a leadership position of a scientific society. This is especially true of a leadership position that is about engagement of young researchers, the place where our diversity in the sciences is the greatest.

I also paused when I considered that I’m at an institution with no doctoral programs or post-docs. Yes, I’m a graduate program coordinator for my department, but it’s a master’s program. Would I be in touch enough with the realities of the more advanced training programs that would make up the bulk of the constituents?

Finally, I had a truly selfish reason: committee work will cut into research time. And the research had been going well, and I don’t want that to stop.

Ultimately, one of the main reasons I agreed to do this was that the hint was dropped that if I didn’t do the student committee, the Executive Committee would keep after me to do something for the society. The judgement had been rendered, and it was all a question of how sentence would be carried out. I picked the devil I knew versus the one I didn’t.

Getting too old for this

“We at the Society for Neuroscience would like to take this moment to remind you...

“That you are old. I mean, seriously old. I mean, you think that wizard in Lord of the Rings is old...

“But he hasn’t been a member of the Society for a quarter century now, has he? No he has not.”

Zune journals

Remember the Zune?

Apple changes how people listen to music with the iPod, makes a lot of money. Microsoft tries to get in on the action with the “me too” Zune.

The story did not end well for the Zune. I never saw a Zune in anyone’s hands, ever.

In my email inbox today:

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is exploring the possibility of publishing a new online-only, peer-reviewed open access journal.

The email asks me to take a survey, which I do. The Society is looking at a journal that would be supported by article processing fees of a couple of thousand bucks, open access, that might be a little light on the copyediting. You know, like PLOS ONE or Frontiers journals or the PeerJ (albeit the suggested charges make the proposed journal significantly more expensive than PeerJ).

You know, for all that some people criticize PLOS ONE, an awful lot of publishers seem to want to make pointless duplicates of it. And like the Zune, such a journal might limp along for a while. Author submissions expand to fill the available journals, just like clutter expands to fill the available space, and data expands to fill the available hard drive.

Is the problem facing authors, readers, the scientific community in general a lack of places to publish? No, it is not. We have enough places to publish. We do not need new journals, unless they can show they do something different in their editorial practices (PLOS ONE) or business model (PeerJ), or maybe focus attention an new field of research. We need existing journals to stop slavishly following the traditions and patterns of behaviour that made perfect sense when only paper journals existed.

Stop it, SfN. Just stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Stop believing that the imprimatur of the society is so strong and so meaningful that we are all going to be submit papers to your Zune journal.

ESA still not supporting open access

The Ecological Society of America drew attention to itself last week for a statement regarding open access for scientific publication. Jonathan Eisen covered it here.

I posted the link to Eisen’s post this on ESA’s Facebook page, and today, there was this comment from ESA on Facebook:

ESA’s recent letter in response to OSTP’s Request for Information has generated discussion in the social media realm. This is perhaps a good example of the inherent conflict between the interests of those who believe research publications should make their content freely available to all and the reality that there are significant costs associated with publishing scholarly research journals. This topic will continue to be one with which the scientific community must grapple and one that will continue to evolve.

My response was that they seemed to be confusing “access” with “profit.” PLoS ONE has proved that open access journals can be profitable. Other publishers (Brill; see here) have recognized this.

If journals are worried about losing their subscriptions, I suggest this: Keep the technical articles free and print other, original content that people will pay for.

For instance, let’s go back the the journal Science, which I suggested would be a good target to convert open access. Only a small fraction of the original technical articles in Science are going to be relevant to any particular reader. As it stands, a subscriber to Science is getting a lot of non-targeted articles that are irrelevant to them.

What Science has been really good at is providing news and commentary. That is much more widely relevant to a broader spectrum of readers. I think if all the technical articles were still free, people would probably still be willing to pay money for all the other original writing. The conference reports, the policy analysis, and so on. That original work by professional writers is something that people realize should not be free. At least, the arguments for making it free are different than the usual ones used to justify open access, that is that publicly funded scientists are doing all of the intellectual work.

But oddly, the tendency for general journals has been to do the exact opposite. Journals have tended to make a few of their comments freely available, while locking down all the original science.

So, ESA, if you want people to stay members of your society, to give them reasons to do so besides original journal articles. I doubt it’s the main reason that most people join scientific societies. In fact, ESA, you yourself have surveyed why people joined your society.

The number one reason given in a membership survey for joining ESA was, “Supporting the field of ecology.” For young members, under the age of 35, “opportunities to present or publish my work” was third in the list but that’s difficult to interpret because it includes presenting at conferences and not just the journals. Regardless, it’s not just for the journals you publish.

When they asked lapsed members what might make them rejoin the society, the three main reasons were for information and career development. These were things that require more than just original journal articles. For example, the first item on the list was, “Help me stay abreast of developments in my field.” Sure, that is something that is partly about original research, but good original analysis and news reporting would also seem to be valuable to members. Why not give it to them?

Reference

ESA. 2012. ESA membership survey, February 2011 summary of results Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 93(1): 13-23. DOI: 10.1890/0012-9623-93.1.13

Why “Facebook for scientists” sites keep dying

Because they continually fill up with crap like this. Here’s a selection of topics listed in a “Recent activity” email I got from a science social networking site:

How can cosmic consciousness be studied?

With paradigm-shifting hypotheses in string theory and data from the LHC. And doing a lot of drugs.

Is anybody working on 'language processing in bilinguals by using ERPs like N400 or P600?' Need help in this area. Thank You.

How could someone ever find out the answer to that question if it weren’t for a social media sites?

Hello All Well I am just an amateur in this field. But i am too intrigued about the phenomenon occurring in the highly convulated object of our body....

You may be an amateur in neuroscience, but you’re an expert in letting me know which topics to avoid.

Emg????

Because multiple punctuation marks always get more attention!ll!!eleventy!111!

These are all topics in a social networking site sponsored by a general scientific society. It’s a society that’s fairly easy to join.

The alerts show one of the problems with wannabe science social networking sites. They get organized around topics, and not people. The brilliant thing about the best social sites is that they help you find people worth listening to. People talk about a lot of different things, and part of the fun is listening and finding out the variety of little quirks and interests people have.

Twitter would be nowhere near as much fun if you followed hashtags rather than users.

The official SfN neurobloggers, 2011

Colour me puzzled.

Last year, I wrote about the puzzlement about the Society for Neuroscience’s choice of official bloggers. I didn’t recognize a one.

With today’s announcement of the Neuroscience 2011 neurobloggers, I confess I am still baffled by the SfN’s social media strategy. Unlike last year, year, I do recognize one blogger, the mighty Scicurious.

I wonder if the strategy is to shine a light on new bloggers.

Looking at the Twitter accounts, Scicurious has more followers on Twitter than all other ten neurobloggers combined. Most have tens of followers when I checked, a few hours after the announcement. The Twitter feed of one of the neurobloggers is currently protected, not open, which seems contrary to the spirit of covering the meeting. (Of course, the person could make their feed public when the meeting starts.)

As for the blogs themselves, one – Neuroflocks – doesn’t seem to be a blog in the traditional sense. It’s a cool-looking tweet aggregator and analysis site, but I’m not seeing any posts.

I’m most baffled that two blogs didn’t exist at all a week ago, which happened last year, too. The application to be a neuroblogger asked for samples, including previous conference coverage. I bow to the two blog authors, who I can only assume wrote great proposals for what they would do.

I’m looking forward to all the coverage of one of the world’s biggest scientific meetings, both official and unofficial! Neuroscience is so big that even 100 bloggers could not cover it all...

Fields of research

As a graduate program coordinator, I field questions from students. Sometimes they ask about marine biology. I’ve gotten shocked looks when I tell people that marine biology doesn’t exist.

Well, I never put it in quite so many words, but the gist of it is that marine biology is not currently a distinct research field in biology the way people think it is.

Biology used to divide itself by the type of organism you worked with. There were zoologists, botanists, entomologists, mycologists, microbiologists, and so on. But that’s not how biologists divide their fields now. Biology is divided up into physiology, ecology, developmental biology, cell biology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and so on.

One of the ways to recognize research fields is the societies that scientists form to promote their fields. I belong to a lot of them. The Society for Neuroscience, the Animal Behavior Society, the International Society for Neuroethology, the Ecological Society of America (from which I was just blogging last week), the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and a few others.

There’s no Marine Biology Society.

Marine biology may have once been more of a defined discipline. But there used to be departments of microscopy, too, and you don’t find those any more. Scientific fields come and go, and academics reorient themselves to new fields all the time.

I don’t quite know how marine biology has gotten fixed in the minds of students, and more widely, the general public, as something that exists as an active research discipline.

Are there other scientific fields that exist in the mind of non-scientists, but not in practice?

Join The Crustacean Society!

This one is for the professionals in the audience.

I just received an email from Fred Schram, the editor of The Journal of Crustacean Biology (JCB). It was a classic “good news / bad news” scenario.

First the good news (slightly edited):

In recent years, we have introduced many changes to the journal including:

• Color-coded volumes for easy shelf-retrieval
• On-line submission of articles through AllenTrack
• Digital production that is helping to hold down costs
• New website for ease of access: jcbonline.org

More changes are on the way in the coming months:

• Choice of on-line as well as hard copy publication
• Reduced rates for students
• Enhanced production values
• Advanced notice of articles accepted for publication
• Increased ease of links to meeting and other important web-sites

Submissions to JCB are up; we have a wider array of authors from an increasing number of countries across the globe; we are recording increasing number of hits in BioOne to JCB articles as evidenced by a rise in income from BioOne and JSTOR; our impact factor is rising. In other words, people are using JCB!

Now the bad news:

However, while we continue to move JCB into the digital age, our membership in The Crustacean Society (TCS) has been slipping away. Sad to say, in 2010, for the first time TCS ran a deficit. There appears to be a curious disconnect. Because of the internet, use and access to the JCB are up. But people do not seem to realize that if we do not have enough TCS members, there will not be a journal.

Sometimes people ask what they get from scientific societies. High quality journals at a reasonable price compared to for profit publishers is a major one. If you do research with crustaceans, consider joining the Society!

To join, just click on: http://tcs.allenmm.com

Full disclosure: I am a member of The Crustacean Society, have published, and have a paper in press in, The Journal of Crustacean Biology.

Who are the Society for Neuroscience bloggers?

My eyebrows went up when I saw the list of officially sanctioned bloggers for this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting.

I didn’t recognize a single solitary one.

I don’t pretend to read all the neuroblogs, but I would have thought that I would have recognized somebody.

Luckily for me, Tideliar has investigated these bloggers, thus saving me an afternoon and evening of obsessive work. And his results are much like my first reaction: “Are you serious?”

As a dues-paying member of the society, I thought, “I wonder who I could give my input to to improve this?” But there doesn’t seem to be any clear contact point on the society’s committees.

Nu Omega -- much better than the old omega

At lunch today, we official (re) installed a chapter of Beta Beta Beta in my department. This is a national honor's society for biology, which support undergraduate student academic success and undergraduate researchers.

Being Canadian, where the practice of fraternities and sororities has never been strong on universities, I had a certain suspicion about a society with so many Greek letters in it. But the students wanted a chapter, and I wanted to support the students, so I said I would be the advisor for the chapter and help get them off the ground.

So we had Ron Humphery, the regional director, down to officially start the chapter. It turned out that this was bringing a chapter back to our institution. We had a chapter way back in the 1980s, apparently -- our tech Tom was a member back then. But somehow, it lapsed and there hasn't been one for a long, long time.

Dr. Humphrey was actually a little surprised by how much the national office sent down for our new chapter, particularly a huge tablecloth with the Beta Beta Beta seal, which made the various bits on display (the charter for the chapter, the coat of arms, membership book, candles, etc.) look pretty darn classy.

And now we are chapter Nu Omega, with a few new members and high hopes. We'll see how it goes.

Lights out

A few minutes before five o'clock, the power went out in my office. My building. And I soon learned the power was off on the entire campus. It took a while to find out a transformer had gone out, and power wasn't coming back on in a few minutes.

At least this was at the end of the day. If it had been earlier, it would have been very disruptive to the site visit of the regional director for Beta Beta Beta. Students are trying to establish a chapter – they need a faculty advisor – and I said, “Okay.” So part of establishing a chapter is the visit, and I think that went well.

In other emergencies...

Our president had to go through major heart surgery unexpectedly. And we also just found out that one of our scheduled Science Symposium speakers for HESTEC has to cancel because he has to go in for major heart surgery (triple bypass). And our Beta Beta Beta visitor was the recipient of quadruple bypass surgery not too long ago.

Paying dues

I finally joined the National Center for Science Education. I probably should have joined a long time ago. What finally pushed me to join was a couple of recent stories about individuals on the Texas Board of Education talking about how school textbooks should address "weaknesses" in evolutionary theory.

Translation: "We think evolution is wrong, but we can't say that we object on religious grounds in science classes because the courts have repeatedly ruled against teaching religion in public schools in the United States, so we'll just attack it at every opportunity."

And because I live in Texas, but, as a Canadian citizen, can't vote, this seemed one way that I might be able to contribute ensuring that my research discipline isn't weakened in Texas schools.

LFHCfS

What do I have to say about this?

I did not nominate myself.

And sometimes, there's just nothing else to say...

The expanding blogosphere

I've become a member of a blogging team for FUNFaculty. This is blog run by the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience, which I belong to. New Orleans has hosted the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting many times, so that is, of course, one of the initial topics for discussion.

I don't think I've mentioned it, but in fact, New Orleans hosted the 1991 Society for Neuroscience meeting, which I attended early in my graduate career. That was only the second meeting at which I presented my doctoral research, and the first national / international one I'd presented at.

It's bigger than I thought

When I last checked the tally board at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, attendance was around 25,000. Of course, I left early, but I suspected that it wouldn't hit 30,000, guessing that most of the people would have arrived for the start of the meeting. Wrong! Email from the Society says final attendance for scientists was a staggering 31,549!

One of the concerns that I have when I see a number like that, though, is where will the growth end? And, as my former Ph.D. committee member Craig Hawryshyn once mused in my presence, "Who's going to fund all this research?"

2003: So long, baby!

The major task I've spending the last few days working with people on the revisions to the new redesigned website for the International Society for Neuroethology. If you click on the link and see a page with a red band down the left, that's the old site; the new site should be up later today or tomorrow.

You can't help but to be reflective on the last day of the year. As much for my own mental health as anything, here's a recap of some of the things I did this year besides goofing off.

Teaching: I taught my new class, Neurobiology (BIOL3310) the first time in the spring, and again in fall. Also had my first independent study students and Honours students. Got one small grant for a teaching technology pilot project.

Research: Wrote three external grant applications: two were rejected and one had the program killed before I could submit the letter. Got one small grants from within UTPA. Got one of my manuscripts from my post-doc in Australia accepted and in the pipeline for publication next year.

Service: Organized a symposium for the annual Animal Behavior Society meeting. Took over as chair of the Search Committee, and managed to attract somewhat more and better applicants than we had in previous years. And, as noted above, oversaw the redesign of neuroethology.org.

And is that enough? No! In 2004, I am really going to have to pick up the pace for getting grants and getting publications if I want to keep this job. Which I do. Most of the time.

ISN EC and other letters

Wow. Almost a week since I posted last? Let's see what's happened...

All my current students seemed to have gotten on well, and are continuing to make progress.

I had two new students, Gloria and Anna, walk into my office on Tuesday asking if they might be able to do Honors projects with me in the fall.

I managed to sneak out with Isaiah and Nisha to the Coastal Studies Lab to collect some sand crabs on Thursday. Fortunately, we had reasonable success to pull some animals up without too much time. Though the return trip did take slightly longer than I anticipated, but I think Nisha was able to make arrangements so that her friends would forgive her for her instructor bringing her into Uni 20 minutes late...

On Friday, I set off on another trip. This time I was off to Chicago to attend the executive committee meeting of the International Society for Neuroethology (ISN). Unfortunately, the trip to Chicago was not smooth, nor welcome. I had just come back Monday, and the Houston airport was a zoo then. I didn't want to go back through Houston airport two more times in less than a week...

And I got stuck there for about four hours longer than I was supposed to be. There were thunderstorms in Chicago, and they weren't letting any incoming flights in. At one point, they went so far as to load us on the plane before they turned back to the terminal and cancelled the flight all together.

I finally got to Chicago, and that airport was also a zoo. I had to take a cab to the hotel and had a touchy moment with the cabbie ("What do you mean, you don't take credit cards in this cab?"). I was in a terribly foul mood that night, which wasn't improved by waking up at 5:00 am the next morning. Fortunately, it did improve slightly during the meeting itself. We managed to get through the agenda in reasonable time, though it did take the whole day.

The major compensation for the trip came that night, were the committee members got treated to a rather nice meal at Va Pensiero.

Flew back Sunday, and had another odd experience at Chicago airport. I was sitting, happily reading a paperback science fiction novel, when a woman walked up to me and said, "Dr. Faulkes?" I raised my eyebrows and said uncertainly, "Yeeeeeah?" Turns out she was a Biology major from UTPA who was going to be taking my Neurobiology course in the fall. She was in Chicago as part of a leadership conference sort of thing.

And on the last leg of the flight from Houston, I was pretty sure I saw our University's provost on the plane. But I may have been mistaken, since this person was flying first class, and administrators would never fly first class when their University was in the middle of budget cutbacks, would they...?

The first thing I had to do this morning was to go to a meeting regarding a Howard Hughes Medical Institution grant our Dean is spearheading. Now, I think I just have a lot of writing to do in that last couple of weeks before classes start up again.